BJ 

1498 

,S4- 





Class 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



The Art of Life Series 



The Use of Leisure 



THE ART OF LIFE SERIES 
Edward Howard Griggs, Editor 

The Use of Leisure 



BY 
TEMPLE SCOTT 

AUTHOR OF "THE PLEASURES OF READING, 
EDITOR OF "swift's PROSE WORKS," 
ETC., ETC. 




NEW YORK 
W. HUEBSCH 
1913 






Copyright, 1913, 
By B. W. HUEBSCH 



JAN 15 1914 



PRINTED IN U. S. A. 



©aA3G2159 






TO 

ALEXANDER BLAIR THAW 

He holds his seat ^ — a friend to human race. 



A' 9 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Acknowledgment is hereby made 
to the editor of The Forum, in 
which parts of this book origi-^ 
nally appeared, for permission ta 
reprint. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Wanted — Leisure . ;. . > . ii 

II The Right Use of Leisure . . 45 

III Work, the Creator ^^ m » .. 81 



The Use of Leisure 



WANTED — LEISURE 

Making a living is not living; making 
a living is only a means to living. We 
have not thought of this, of course. We 
are so tasked In the work that we have not 
the time in which to recover ourselves for 
reflection. We never do recover our- 
selves. Our selves are lost, drowned in 
the flood of labor and the waves of com- 
petition. We are so accustomed to spend 
the best years of our lives In efforts to keep 
alive that living is come to mean work- 
ing in order to be able to go on work- 
ing. The wage Is not the stepping- 
stone to independence or the incentive to 
self- fulfilment; It is the exchange value of 
the Indispensable daily bread. So in- 
grained In us is this habit of work that 
we even count ourselves fortunate and 
think ourselves happy when we have sc- 



12 The Use of Leisure 

cured a position which assures us the 
work. Like the negro laundress who 
thought herself lucky in a husband who 
saw to It that she did not want a day's 
washing, we also are grateful that each 
to-morrow finds the work ready for our 
hands to do. For work means food and 
shelter; and food and a shelter mean life. 
Life, quotha ! God help us ! 

The day's work done we go home to 
rest, if we can, to regain the strength lost 
for the next day's work. Perhaps anxiety 
about the work prevents us from resting; 
then we lie awake disturbed and distressed. 
Perhaps the work absorbs our whole 
thoughts; then Is every other Interest ex- 
cluded — self, friends, wife and family, 
home and the duties and delights of social 
life. We are machines that are run down 
each evening, to be cranked up again each 
morning. And we are actually glad thus 
to labor. Thank God for work, we cry, 
when sorrow or affliction visits us. In 
work, at any rate, we can drown our trou- 
bles. Work Is for us the sustainer of hope, 
the comforter and soother in times of de- 
spair; the one remedy for the thousand 
heart-ills which afflict us In this Vale of 
Tears. Great writers have penned vibra- 



Wanted — Leisure 13 

ting dithyrambs In praise of work. 
"Blessed are the horny hands of toil;" 
" Yet toil on, toil on ; thou art in thy 
duty, be out of it who may; " " To Labor 
is to pray;" "To Labor is the lot of 
man below;" "Labor is independent and 
proud." They write the word with a capi- 
tal letter as if it were in itself a splendid 
and inspiring truth. They have raised a 
new idol for us to worship. Oh, idola- 
trous and Sabbathless SatansI 

It Is a melancholy utinam, as Sir 
Thomas Browne would have said, this in- 
human craving for work — the cry of the 
starving for food; the prayer of the lost 
for salvation; the petition of the con- 
demned for respite ; the pitiful wail of the 
destitute for a home. The will to live is 
so strong In us, and the way to live so 
narrow and crowded, that the market for 
labor Is like a battlefield with the fight still 
going on. For, in spite of all our boasted 
enlightenment, we have found out but one 
means of living — killing the weaker and 
taking his place. And yet the work we 
get Is not for the fulfilment of the spirit; 
it does not ennoble us. We grasp after it 
with the convulsive, passionate hands of 
the drowning man stretching for a spar 



14 The Use of Leisure 

that win float him to a haven. And when 
the haven Is reached we are captured and 
harnessed to a mortar wheel. Like stupid 
oxen or blind horses we go, henceforward, 
round and round in a daily grind. And 
man's free spirit is killed. " Thou tollest 
for the altogether indispensable, for daily 
bread.'* What a satire on living is this 
making a living! 

Is it not time we took thought a little 
on this business of work? I am not rail- 
ing against the toil for the daily bread. I 
am ready to agree with all the fine things 
that have been and can be said of it. But 
I do denounce and stigmatize as contempt- 
ible and unmanly that attitude toward the 
work we are compelled to do, which ac- 
cepts it as the be-all and the end-all of 
human aspiration. This is not work, it 
is drudgery, and as such It Is degrading 
and enslaving. As it is practised and un- 
derstood to-day In the thousands of centres 
of modern civilization, this drudgery is one 
of the most pernicious Influences that can 
aflllct mankind. There Is nothing sacred 
in it, nothing beautiful, nothing worthy. 
Go through a modern department store 
and tell me If the work done there by the 
hundreds of young men and young women 



Wanted — Leisure 1 5 

IS either worthy or beautiful or sacred. 
Examine the factories, the coal mines, the 
railroads, the offices of merchants and 
newspapers and shop-keepers, and show me 
there the sanctity and the beauty of labor. 
Oh, yes, all these creatures, delving and 
digging, are earning their living. Some 
of them, indeed, have found the work fitted 
for them and have made inventions and 
improvements in the enterprises with 
which they are associated. Some have so 
far progressed that they have themselves 
become employers. What of it all? 
Have they done anything more than 
make a living? And if they have saved 
money, if even they have become mil- 
lionaires, have they done anything more 
than toil? Do they do anything more 
than go on toiling? If they do — then 
for what? For doing more toil, and 
more toil? For making more money and 
more money? And this is living! 

I hear you! You are telling me that 
it is through work that these United 
States have become the leading country in 
the commerce of the globe; that it is 
through work America is richer and more 
powerful than any other country. I do 
not doubt it. But have these United 



i6 TKe Use of Leisure 

States become a country in which men and 
women are freer, as they set out to be? 
Are the people of this country wiser, 
nobler, more sanely brotherly to each 
other, more spontaneously honest and up- 
right, more premeditatedly kindly and in- 
telligently humane than the people of other 
civilized countries? I doubt it. Human 
nature is the same here as it is the world 
over. They had grafters in Rome and 
we have grafters in New York. They 
have vested interests in Europe and we 
have politicians and trusts in America. 
They have debilitating armies and navies 
in the old world, and we have their like 
in the new. We have not changed much 
by taking a voyage across the Atlantic and 
founding a new republic. This new Eng- 
lish republic is not such an advance on the 
old English monarchy that we need boast 
much about it. We had the chance to 
make it an advance, but we did not use it. 
We did not use it because we did not know 
how. And we did not know how because 
we did not understand that the difference 
between a republic and a monarchy is pro- 
founder than the mere superficial difference 
in government; we did not realize that a 
democracy meant not only political and 



Wanted — Leisure 17 

legal freedom but economic freedom also. 
The old feudal system was a military 
system. The basic assumption of the sys- 
tem was that men were not equal. Under 
it the monarch flourished as a kind of com- 
mander-in-chief of the nation as an army, 
and he had his generals and captains in 
his barons and overlords. It developed 
an aristocracy and class divisions. The 
workingman took his place among the 
lowest classes. He worked for his su- 
perior because he was a unit in an army in 
which the employer was his captain or lord 
or baron — he was his vassal, serf or 
slave. He is still in these lowest classes, 
to-day, in monarchical countries. He is 
still there because the feudal system is still 
the system of business and the employment 
of labor. The wage-earner is part of a 
militariat exactly similar to any military 
organization. As an individual he does 
not count. He counts only as a fraction 
of a larger unit — the factory, the brewery, 
the railway corporation, the mining enter- 
prise, the store, the mercantile office. It 
is these larger units that are considered 
in estimating the power and the prosperity 
of a nation. But so estimated a nation is 
not rich and not powerful, but poverty- 



1 8 The Use of Leisure 

stricken, crime-infested and unstable as 
water. It cannot be otherwise when the 
few are enriched at the expense of the 
many. 

The American Declaration of Inde- 
pendence rejected monarchy and its attend- 
ant aristocracy and class distinctions. It 
declared as truth — that all men are cre- 
ated equal. It left no room for an aristoc- 
racy or class distinctions in either govern- 
ment or social life. But it did not reject 
the militariat system in business. That 
system is still in vogue in this country as 
it is in every country of the world. Un- 
der it the wage-earner is relegated to a 
class subservient to the employer in busi- 
ness and to the plutocrat in social life. So 
that the laborer is now in the same posi- 
tion, economically and socially, as the vas- 
sal and serf were under the old military 
feudal system. In other words the laborer 
is the wage-slave. It is true, he is now 
free to remonstrate and combat by means 
of unions, but his remonstrance and opposi- 
tion avail him little so long as the system 
under which he works compels him to de- 
vote the major part of his daily life to 
making a living. He has not the time 
in which to cultivate intelligent opinion, 



Wanted — Leisure 1 9 

nor the leisure necessary for the develop- 
ment of his mind ; so that he is kept down 
by his own ignorance as well as by the con- 
ditions in which he labors. No wage- 
earner can be free in any real sense if he 
must labor for a wage from eight in the 
morning until six in the evening. 

I have said that the difference between 
a monarchy and a democracy is profounder 
than the superficial difference in govern- 
ment. I mean by that that government, 
whether by a king or a president, is the 
same at bottom, so far as it affects the 
people governed. In republics as in 
monarchies the people are governed by of- 
ficials; and it matters little whether these 
be elected by the people or selected by the 
king, although it is quite conceivable that a 
dictator would choose more wisely than the 
voters. The real difference between a 
democracy and a monarchy is in what I 
might call the soul attitude of the indi- 
viduals governed, and that attitude is alto- 
gether different in a democracy from what 
it is in a monarchy. It is different in that 
in a democracy the unit, for the first time, 
counts. He is not merely a member of a 
social organization; he is not only one in- 
dividual in a nation; he is not simply a 



520 TKe Vse of Leisure 

number in a regiment of soldiers; He 
Is all these, but he is also a man. It 
was to preserve him and his individu- 
ality; it was to safeguard him and his 
rights; it was to assert him and his soul 
that the democracy of the United States 
of America was founded. Otherwise the 
words of the Declaration of Independence 
are blasphemy. " We hold these truths to 
be self-evident — that all men are created 
equal; that they are endowed by their Cre- 
ator with certain unalienable rights; that 
among these are life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness.** 

" Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness!" 

Buried in foul basements and bereft of 
sunlight and air, hundreds of thousands of 
young men and young women are daily oc- 
cupied in a deadly routine of employment 
at tasks that concern them only in so far 
as their accomplishment brings them a 
weekly wage. They are stitching gar- 
ments, treading sewing-machines, pounding 
typewriters, inserting meaningless figures 
in ponderous ledgers, packing parcels, turn- 
ing cranks. And they are doing these 
tasks from early morn till dewy eve. Out 
in the streets and in the country, the blue 



Wanted — Leisure 21 

sky 19 effulgent in golden sunlight, and 
trees are blossoming, birds singing, clouds 
sailing and gentle breezes blowing. But 
the toilers see nothing and feel nothing 
of what is going on without. They 
have not the time; they are too busy as- 
serting their God-given rights to " life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
" Blessed are the horny hands of toil 1 " 

Enclosed in the storeyed lofts of depart- 
ment-stores are other hundreds of thou- 
sands, standing through the livelong day, 
serving customers, waiting on exacting and 
irritating women, scribbling bills, display- 
ing articles for sale, anxiously glancing the 
while at the task-master who walks the 
lofts with the whip-lash of punishment in 
his eye. Some of them catch glimpses 
through the windows of a gleaming river 
and purple hills; but they dare not look 
long. They dream of these beautiful 
things on their way home in the evening 
when they are tired and worn out. Not 
for them are these pleasant places; they 
are too busy proving their rights to " life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
" To labor is the lot of man below ! " 

In stuffy little shops are thousands of 
others — husbands and wives and chil- 



22 The Use of Leisure^ 

dren — smirking, genuflexing, tricking, 
flattering, deceiving, cajoling customers 
into buying the wares they are offering for 
sale. From seven or eight in the morning 
until seven, eight, nine and even ten o'clock 
at night, they are engaged in this degrad- 
ing labor. They have no time for any- 
thing else; for if they took the time their 
neighbor shop-keeper might take customers 
away from them. Moreover, they must, 
at any cost, make good their unalienable 
rights to " life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness." So "Toil on, toil on; 
thou art in thy duty, be out of it who 
may!" 

Digging in mines, delving the earth, 
spinning in mills, forging and hammering 
in factories are hundreds of thousands of 
others, face-begrimed, callous-handed, nar- 
row-chested creatures who may be men and 
women, but they look like parchment- 
stretched skeletons. These have never 
even tasted joy; they are only ravenous for 
existence. They are the slaves of captains 
of Industry. Their pleasures are debilita- 
ting excitements, body-racking indulgences, 
and soul-destroying satisfactions. But 
these too are God-endowed with rights to 
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 



Wanted — Leisure 23 

ness." Oh, " Labor is Independent and 
proud!" 

Ask any one of these millions of wage- 
slaves if he is happy; ask him what he is 
doing and why he is doing it. This will 
be his best answer, even when he has suc- 
ceeded; in the words of the shop-keeper, 
Madame Bernin, in Brieux's play, Ma- 
ternite, he will say: 

" No ; we have not been happy, because 
we have used ourselves up with hunting for 
happiness. We meant to * get there ' ; we 
have * got there,' but at what a price? 
Oh, I know the road to fortune. At first, 
miserable sordid economy, passionate 
greed; then the fierce struggle of trickery 
and deceit, always flattering your custom- 
ers, always living in terror of failure. 
Tears, lies, envy, contempt, suffering for 
yourself and for everyone round you. I've 
been through it and a bitter experience it 
was. We're determined that our children 
shan't. Our children! We have only 
two, but we meant to have only one. That 
extra one meant double toil and hardship. 
Instead of being a husband and wife, help- 
ing one another, we have been two busi- 
ness partners, watching each other like 
enemies, gerpetually quarreling, even on 



24 TKe Use of Leisure 

our very pillow, over our expenditure and 
our mistakes. Finally we succeeded; and 
now we can't enjoy our wealth because we 
don't know how to use it, and because our 
later years are poisoned by memories of 
the hateful past of suffering and rancor." 

" Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness! " 

Go into the millions of city homes, or 
what we may call homes as a pathetic com- 
pliment to those who live in them, and see 
how they fare there, these enjoyers of di- 
vine rights. What are these places, when 
they are not just bearable? The breeding 
grounds of crime and the farms of prosti- 
tution — poisonous weeds that spring up in 
a night from the soil of poverty. Ask 
them what God Is doing for them; and if 
they understand your question, they will 
answer: "God gives us eyes — to cry 
with." They compel themselves to forget 
their state when they can weep no more. 
These are the women whose lives have 
been broken on the wheels of competition 
and crushed beneath the Juggernaut car 
of the mllltariat system. And they al- 
ways carry with them an added source of 
suffering — the corpse of the woman they 
had hoped to be. Ah, Sister, " Yet toil 



Wanted — Leisure 25 

on, toil on, thou art In thy duty, be out 
of it who may! " 

Watch the farmer at his work and his 
family at their daily tasks. The pageant 
of landscape and of sky passes by them un- 
seen. They are bowed and bent earth- 
ward. For a brief moment they look up ; 
but their eyes are blind. For a short space 
they plod homeward a weary way and leave 
the world to darkness and themselves to 
brutish sleep. He is his own taskmaster, 
with the whip of anxiety to spur him on 
to effort after effort. His wife scarce 
knows what it is not to work; for there 
are " chores " to do every day, Sundays 
as well as week days. The grind of their 
toil has worn their faces to unlovely lines. 
They live on hope — the hope that marries 
the daughter, and educates the son for the 
ministry or fits him for the labor of the 
cities. They suck sustenance out of 
the earth with life-spending gasps. Each 
day's labor is a crucifixion of Love on the 
market cross. Yet they also are told that 
*'To labor Is to pray! " 

See the employer at his ofHce desk, trick- 
ing, cajoling, swindling, haggling, direct- 
ing, smirking, juggling, and doing the many 
other worthy and unworthy acts that he 



2$ Whe Use of Leisure 

calls business. He also is harnessed to 
the mortar-wheel. He is the blind leading 
the blind. He is the slave of his enter- 
prise, the creature of his success. Listen 
to him, in his hours of ease, at the restau- 
rant, in the theatre, or at his own dining- 
table, and he is saying " Dollars, dollars, 
dollars ! " If other words fall from his 
lips they have reference to dollars; if he 
talks of art, it is in terms of dollars; if 
he descants of pleasure, it is in the lan- 
guage of the market-place; if he speaks 
of love it is with synonyms for money. 
He knows no God but the Golden Calf 
and no joy but the fever of desire. And 
he Is oppressed with worry and depressed 
by anxiety. If he makes thousands in a 
day he loses them in a night. He is the 
gambler offspring of competition and the 
militariat system. He is Time's slave ; he 
is the chained driver of the competition 
car, doomed for life to cross and re-cross 
the Bridge of Sighs. And in his wake fol- 
low the groans of the hungry and the 
moans of the stricken. Yet he cannot 
help them because he is himself stricken; 
he is the slave of the system which com- 
pels him to do what he does. He may 
be moved to compassion and charity, but 



Wanted — Leisure 27 

he can only talk in the language of dollars, 
and he knows no other mediator. His 
wealth has ruined his manhood and his 
home is a sepulchre of still-born hopes 
and frustrated happiness. He may pray 
for grace, but it is too late for him to be 
redeemed from the passion of his low am- 
bition. He has sold himself for money, 
and he must remain a slave to the most ter- 
rible of all taskmasters — " Yet toil on, 
toil on; thou art in thy duty, be out of it 
who may ! " 

And these are they who have asserted 
and fought for their rights to " life, lib- 
erty, and the pursuit of happiness ! " 

I am not here picturing the lives of the 
people of a tyrannous eastern autocracy. 
The people I have described are the peo- 
ple of an enlightened democracy, of the 
splendid United States. They bear the 
standard of freedom — " Old Glory " they 
proudly and rightly call it. They chant 
the Battle Hymn of the Republic; they 
devoutly honor their brave who died for 
liberty and emancipation; they teach their 
children to lisp the uplifting words of their 
epoch-making Declaration; they have the 
power to choose their own leaders and the 
right of a great nation's might. And yet 



28 The Use of Leisure 

they have allowed themselves to be en- 
slaved by an economic Shibboleth. They 
have deified Competition as a Law of Na- 
ture and have become worshipers of a 
heartless, hopeless idol. Even if this idol 
were a living god, a true ideal, what are 
we doing that we do not compel it to an- 
swer our demands? We compel gravita- 
tion to irrigate our deserts; we imprison 
the fire of heaven to move our railways; 
we command the force of expansion to al- 
leviate our suffering, and employ the 
lightning to bear our messages round the 
globe. Why have we failed to subjugate 
this so-called Economic Law of Competi- 
tion? Why? Because It is not a Law 
of Nature at all. It Is a false god set 
up by our ignorance, and enthroned by 
our greed. We ask it for bread and it 
gives us a stone; we beg it for work and 
it tells us the labor-market is overstocked; 
we pray to it for leisure and it imprisons 
us in cells; we petition it for freedom and 
it sends us digging In mines; we cry to It 
for life and it tells us we have it; we plead 
to it for happiness and It spurns uis to 
misery; we demand of It our rights and 
it calls us *' wage-slaves." And this Is 
the Ideal we have idolized. Natural 



Wanted — Leisure 29 

Law! If ever a law were unnatural this 
is that law. 

I am not now attempting a detailed ex- 
amination of competition. I am concerned 
here with one outcome of it, namely, over- 
production, for over-production is one of 
the immediate causes of the wage-slave's 
condition. Capital has an eager eye. 
When it sees profits it will immediately 
engage itself. It can, however, only see 
profits when the market has already been 
supplied; but it is too jealous to allow one 
or two or three to make profits, so it 
rushes into this profit-making enterprise, 
with the result that the market becomes 
over-supplied. Prices then go down and 
profits decrease. On the decrease the cap- 
italists take a rest. The capitalists' rest 
means either the reduction of the wage- 
earner's wage or his discharge. Evil 
number one. The reduction in prices does 
not much help the wage-earner who is un- 
employed and has no money with which to 
buy. If he is fortunate enough not to be 
discharged and has only had his wage 
lowered he is yet the first to feel the pinch 
of the situation; and if he goes on strike 
for higher wages, both employer and em- 
ployed are sufferers. Evil number two. 



30 The Use of Leisure 

Perhaps the surplus product Is sold in for- 
eign markets at below cost; then a new 
situation of danger Is brought about by a 
retaliating tariff from the foreign countr}^ 
that has Its own economic troubles. Evil 
number three. When the foreign market 
is closed to the over-producer he becomes 
a Jingo, an Imperialist, an advocate for 
colonization and conquest In order to find 
a new market for his produce; he Is the 
first to cry " Fight." Evil number four. 
To contend that over-production bal- 
ances itself and that the period of depres- 
sion is followed by a period of rise, only 
adds Insult to the injury. Is this a Law 
of Nature that breaks down just when It 
ought to work? Surely, this is but specu- 
lating with the market and taking a chance 
to win the race for the profit. Why should 
we be content to go hungry to-day, when 
an Industrial panic is on, because we may 
get a meal next week when the panic shall 
have quieted down? Why are we to per- 
mit ourselves to be thus gambled with? 
We object most strongly to the gambler in 
Industries (for the average capitalist Is 
nothing but a gambler) staking our lives 
In the game of chance he Is playing. We 
refuse to be cast on the green table as 



Wanted — Leisure 31 

" chips." And there Is danger to the 
gambler In this protest; for the protest Is 
the protest of a proletariat army that will 
grow In solidarity very rapidly in the com- 
ing years. And If the Idol of Competi- 
tion be not quietly hidden away In some 
lumber room of discarded faiths, there will 
be trouble for the capitalist-gambler. 

The wily capitalist, seeing the evils of 
over-production, set to work and elabo- 
rated a way for himself by which he could 
avoid them. He combined with other 
capitalists in the same Industry, and formed 
the trust. He formed it peaceably where 
he could, but when he met with resistance 
he used drastic methods, strange and weird 
methods, that take us back to the middle 
ages for their like In cold-blooded implaca- 
bility. What the trust is we all know. I 
call it evil number five of over-production, 
and the worst evil of them all. 

To resist the tyranny of the capitalists, 
and to save himself from utter slavery, 
the wage-earner combined with his fellow 
wage-earners and founded the Trade- 
Union. So that now we have the two 
armies of capitalists and wage-earners op- 
posed to each other, and hating each other, 
and only working together in what is in 



32 TKe Use of Leisure 

reality a state of armed peace because 
each cannot do without the other. And 
the wage-earner has become the creature 
of his tyrant union. Evil number six of 
over-production. 

Yet out of all these evils good is cer- 
tain to come. The evil of the unem- 
ployed has already opened the eyes of the 
unemployed, and a discontent is ripening 
into an awareness of injustice. The evil 
of strikes has produced the Labor Com- 
missions and Arbitration Boards; the evil 
of the retaliating tariff leads to Reciprocity 
and will eventually bring us to Free Trade ; 
the evil of the Jingo fighter will make 
good blood in a juster and more righteous 
cause; the evil of the trusts will be trans- 
figured when their public utility corpora- 
tions shall have been municipalized and 
their magnificent organizations of indus- 
tries properly supervised. And with the 
transformation of these evils the wage- 
earner will no longer be the wage-slave at 
the mercy of capital and the competition 
system. He will break free from the 
tyranny of his unions by abolishing them, 
for the day of their need will have passed 
away. And he will give his strength to a 
cooperative commonwealth which, assuring 



Wanted — Leisure 33 

him of his life and liberty, will enable him 
to devote his free spirit to the pursuit of 
his happiness. 

The ruins of over-production being the 
result of the bhnd cataclysmic force of 
competition, it might be well to study this 
blind force and see how it can be pre- 
vented or directed. This has been done; 
but as the result of investigations points to 
a houleversement, to an entire reversal of 
present economic methods, it is too danger- 
ous an experiment to engage the wage- 
earner In it, and he is not yet fit for the 
undertaking. It is certainly asking of the 
employer more than he will consent to. 
It will be wise for us to take a seemingly 
more circuitous road, especially if we de- 
sire to bring about the final result peace- 
ably and intelligently. This road is the 
road of leisure. 

A signal victory over the capitalist was 
won by the skilled wage-earner when he se- 
cured the eight-hour day. But the ad- 
vantage gained is only partial; and it is not 
all along the line of labor. The skilled 
wage-earner will have done better when he 
has secured the four-hour working-day; 
and labor will have done better still when 
its unskilled shall be as happily condi- 



34 The Use of Leisure 

tloned as Its skilled. A four-hour work- 
ing-day will mean the employment of more 
labor and give more leisure to the laborer. 
Prices will, of course, go up; but there is 
a limit to the rise, and when that limit is 
reached capital will find that it does not 
pay to engage itself too insistently In com- 
petitive markets, and labor will discover 
its proper place in the changed economic 
conditions that will follow. And if capi- 
tal attempt to ignore the limit, it may find 
its very existence threatened. Competi- 
tion will decrease and over-production 
cease. Wages will, of course, go down; 
but there is a limit to the fall, for the capi- 
talist, in an uncompeting market, will find 
his profits settling to a satisfactory level, 
or to a level that he must eventually con- 
tent himself with. The capital that is un- 
engaged will find other fields for enter- 
prises, which over-production has not 
made barren. If It does not, it will not 
matter, for capital is not wealth; It be- 
comes wealth only when transmuted by la- 
bor. Moreover, the new conditions which 
will arise out of this Hberation of the 
worker will make for changed economic 
principles. Wealth, wages, value, credit 
— these words will have living meanings 



Wanted — Leisure 35 

and stand for practical ideas, when It is 
once understood that the business of life 
is nothing else than the rapprochement be- 
tween the individual and the nature of 
things; and that all wealth Is the embodi- 
ment of the power to utilize Nature for 
the purpose of man's happiness. This, 
after all Is said and done, is the only rea- 
son for the existence of any social com- 
munity. 

But the skilled laborer forms only a 
small body of the Industrial population of 
this country. There are thirty odd mil- 
lions of clerks, domestics, petty tradesmen, 
shop-assistants, and other unskilled work- 
ers, who are still subjected to their em- 
ployers' will In the matter of the length 
of the working-day. Whether through 
Indifference or incapacity, these have not 
organized themselves Into unions, with the 
result that they are the flotsam and jet- 
sam on the ocean of labor. They live in 
continual fear of being supplanted by a 
great army of unemployed always ready to 
take their places. Well, little good will 
be accomplished until these also combine 
and obtain the shorter working-day. Ele- 
ments for strong associations undoubtedly 
exist among clerks, typists and shop-assist- 



36 TRe 'Use of Leisure 

ants, and these must be welded for a com- 
mon purpose. Public sentiment will help 
them, for public sentiment Is easily enlisted 
on the side of Injustice done to the un- 
protected. They must, if they are to live 
decently, obtain, at any rate, the eight- 
hour working-day. No store should be 
open after four o'clock in the summer and 
five o'clock In the winter; and there should 
be a mid-week half holiday as well as the 
Saturday half day. We need not be 
afraid of the results of these changes. 
Capital can stand this strain, and It will 
be afraid to resist a united and deter- 
mined opposition. Dislocation In business 
is a thing more to be dreaded than the 
shortening of the working-day. A definite 
and reasonable demand and a solidarity of 
front are the first requisites to an allevi- 
ation of hard-pressing conditions. Unity 
of purpose and solidarity of effort will, In 
the end, overcome every economic diffi- 
culty. And If to ask these of the unskilled 
wage-earner Is to ask too much of him, 
then is he lost. It is because I think I am 
not asking too much of him, and It is be- 
cause I believe he must be saved, that I 
am appealing to him to take heart and be 
up and doing. He has not so much to 



Wanted — Leisure 37 

lose that he should be fearful of risking 
it; and he has much to gain. He has his 
life, his liberty, his happiness to gain, and 
the lives, liberties and happiness of his 
wife and children. He has the love of 
country to recover; he has his pride in his 
citizenship to reestablish; he has the dig- 
nity of his manhood to maintain. And he 
can do none of these things so long as he 
permits the hours of his conscious life to 
be at the call of a master who has no inter- 
est in him except as a possibility for profit, 
and so long as he accepts the wages of a 
slave for his life as a man. 

Why do I insist so much on leisure? 
Because leisure is time, and time is life. 
Leisure means liberty, freedom for the as- 
sertion of self ;Jeisure is the first requisite 'i 
for_making possible for us the pursuit of, 
happiness. Give a poor man time and 
you enrich him. Give him time and you 
empower him so that he will move moun- 
tains by taking thought. In time he will 
rejuvenate the earth and make it, indeed, 
a jocund earth. I ask for leisure because 
with leisure a man can recover himself and 
find his right place in the society which 
should dignify him and he it. He can 
grow in understanding and grow in wis- 



38 The Use of Leisure 

dom, with leisure. He has the time in 
which to be a father, a lover, a friend, and 
a comrade. The fine sap of his humanity 
can mount and nourish the tender branches 
of his family tree. The Home will real- 
ize his dreams of Home, for it will be the 
joyous place where character is made, and 
with the making of character will be born 
nobler fathers and more willing mothers. 

Give a man leisure and you re-create 
him. We may not then be able to hood- 
wink him with our economic shibboleths, 
but we shall be glad that we are not thus 
able. His eyes will have been opened, 
and he will open our eyes in turn. We 
shall realize our past foolishness in the 
splendid cooperation of this leisure-born 
friendly helper. Work will be no longer 
the hateful necessity it is now; it will be 
acceptable, and accomplished as the ex- 
pression of the worker's sincerity. It will 
be honest work, giving in labor done one 
hundred cents for every dollar of wage 
received. It will be this because the 
worker will be fit, and willing, and bound 
In honor. He will give then more in four 
hours than he gives now in fourteen. 

This time for which I ask would not be 
missed by the employer. Were we to- 



Wanted — Leisure 39 

day to collect the time wasted in our many 
business enterprises and present it to the 
workers we should find we had lost noth- 
ing by the gift, and the gift would be no 
less than one-fourth of a present working- 
day. As a matter of fact, few human be- 
ings can possibly be equally efficient during 
every hour of the ten or twelve hours of 
a laboring day. Time is wasted in make- 
believe at work, in fussing and purposeless 
moving to and fro, in lifting and putting 
back what need not have been moved. 
Especially is time wasted in talk — the 
talk of the foreman, the talk of the man- 
ager, the talk of the employer, the talk of 
the schemer, the talk of the incompetent 
and hesitating and feeble and vain. It is 
a rare business that is really efficient. In- 
deed, much of the distaste for work is not 
so much due to the work Itself as it is to 
the compulsory waste of time and conse- 
quent prolonged confinement imposed on 
the worker by Incompetent employers and 
supervisors. We grudge the wage-earner 
a dollar rise in his wages, but we lose a dol- 
lar a day by our waste of his time. The 
shorter working-day will compel a wiser 
supervision, a more concentrated effort, a 
closer application and a more definite at- 



40 The Use of Leisure 

tention. Time wasted Is money wasted, 
opportunity lost, enthusiasm dampened and 
the working spirit demoralized. 

There has never been a period In the his- 
tory of the world so stirred by social dis- 
content as the present; and never before, 
not even during the years immediately 
prior to the French Revolution, was the 
discontent so deep-rooted and so fraught 
with danger to the community. Increase 
In population, overcrowding In cities, com- 
petition in the labor-market, over-produc- 
tion, higher cost of living, the stupidity 
and the selfishness of the capitalist, the 
vicious remedy of labor strikes, all these 
have contributed to the sowing of discon- 
tent. How to allay it ; how to bring about 
juster conditions for the mass of the popu- 
lation, are questions which have occupied 
and are occupying the minds of the best 
thinkers. Solutions without number, from 
Utopias to Cooperative Societies, have 
been propounded and tested, and yet the 
situation remains unaltered. No solution 
Is, however, possible without the active 
sympathy and intelligent cooperation of 
the people to be satisfied. The solution 
must come from them and not from the 
academic philosopher, be he never so well- 



Wanted — Leisure 41 

meaning, and they cannot as yet know 
what Is best for them. Their sympathies 
are too easily engaged, because of the 
stress of their conditions, for any seem- 
ingly helpful schemes; and their cooper- 
ation cannot be intelligent because their 
outlook is narrowed by their immediate 
wants. Unintelligent sympathy is a terri- 
bly dangerous emotion to experiment with. 
Our first business is to refine their sym- 
pathy to the fineness of discretion, and cul- 
tivate their intelligence to the point of en- 
thusiasm. It is not possible to produce 
either of these qualities so long as the 
wage-earner is the slave of his work, and 
so long as he is compelled to give to it 
the greater part of his day*s life. It Is 
to rationalize his emotion and to emotion- 
alize his reason that I ask for leisure. 
When he acquires an intelligent enthusi- 
asm for service, then will his service be a 
vital contribution; the patient will then 
help the doctor. Perhaps, indeed, he will 
not need the doctor. 

Leisure makes for health, and health is 
an absolute necessity to the cultivation of 
intelligence. The unintelllgence displayed 
by the average labor voter is largely due 
to bad health brought on by drink. 



42 The Use of Leisure 

Drink is the solace of the tired laborer 
who takes It in the first instance as a spur 
to his jaded body. The leisured working- 
man will have no need for this spur. 
With the decrease in drunkenness will in- 
crease the health of the community. 

Leisure makes for character; not the 
character of the poverty-smitten creature 
of the competitive labor-market, but the 
character of the free man, the democratic 
citizen, the gentleman in the best sense of 
the word. He will have time for social 
intercourse, for study, for invigorating and 
inspiriting exercise. He will recapture his 
flown youth In play with his children, and 
regain his lost hopes, and re-live the joy- 
ous days of his early love. 

Leisure Is no respecter of class distinc- 
tion; It is a splendid democrat. It has 
been made to symbolize aristocracy, but its 
nature is not aristocratic; Its nature is hu- 
manitarian. Ignorance on the one hand, 
and sentimentality on the other, have ac- 
corded It aristocratic honors; but igno- 
rance and sentimentality are responsible 
for most of the mistakes we make, not the 
least of which Is the abuse of leisure by 
the so-called leisured class. 

Leisure Is a re-distributor of power. 



Wanted — Leisure 43 

When leisure shall be a common enjoy- 
ment and over-production ceases, wealth 
will be more evenly divided, and with the 
more even division of wealth will follow 
a redistribution of power. Moreover, 
the leisured man is thrown on his own re- 
sources and he will have the chance to 
make good. If he fails he will only have 
himself to blame. What he Is to do with 
leisure so that he shall make good I ex- 
plain In the next chapter. 

This being to be born of leisure, and 
he alone, is the man we want for our revo- 
lutionary purpose. We want him because 
without him all our efforts at betterment 
are mere patching and tinkering. He, 
and he alone, will have the insight that we 
lack; and he alone can help us to a happy 
practical Issue out of all the afflictions 
which beset us to-day. When the leisured 
worklngman comes he will show us how to 
do away with sweat-shops, how to clean 
slums and wash streets, and drain cities. 
He himself will reform our schools, regu- 
late our traffic, reject our faithless serv- 
ants. He will rebuild our cities, remake 
our homes, reform our parliaments. He 
will remodel our armies and reestablish 
our navies. He will reelect our officials 



44 \THe Use of Leisure 

and redeem their broken pledges. He 
will plant gardens and people desert places 
and grow vineyards. He will do all these 
things with the enthusiasm of knowledge, 
and he will accomplish all these things be- 
cause he will have the seeing power — the 
tremendous power secretly stored in the 
ballot-box. Look out for the working- 
man who shall say every day at four 
o'clock with Charles Lamb, " I am Re- 
tired Leisure." You will find him in li- 
braries and art galleries, at times; and at 
other times he will be resting on the grassy 
banks of murmuring brooks, or walking 
smilingly in trim gardens. Otium cum 
dignitate. He will not be the Superan- 
nuated Man who was once doggedly con- 
tent to waste his soul at the wooden desk 
of drudgery and is now presented with the 
bonus of a few twilit years in which to sun 
his silvered body. He is the Superla- 
borated Man who cannot live without his 
soul. He never can be superannuated be- 
cause he is always wanted; and he will be 
a long time growing old because he has a 
long time in which to be young. 



II 

THE RIGHT USE OF LEISURE 

An ingenious friend of mine (I use the 
adjective in its eighteenth century applica- 
tion), with whom I often discussed this 
question of work, and for whose opinion 
I have more than a courtesy respect, would 
reply to my argument: "Very fine; but 
your premises are all wrong. You assume 
that most people do not find their happi- 
ness in work, whereas the contrary is the 
fact. It all depends on the spirit in which 
work is done. If people will put their 
hearts into it the work itself will be a 
joy." 

My friend, evidently, had not at all 
grasped my point. It was just because 
people had lost this spirit that it had be- 
come necessary to re-inspIre them. I was 
desirous to put hearts Into people, so that 
work might be a joy to them. My com- 
plaint is that people have lost heart, that 
they no longer have hearts to put into their 
work, and my demand for leisure was by 
U 



46 The Use of Leisure 

way of giving them hope to take heart 
again. For there is no hope for them in 
work as it is done to-day, and they can- 
not take heart in it, because it ends no- 
where, because it is not work but drudg- 
ery; because there can be no enlarging of 
the self in what is not of the self. In 
drudgery there can be naught but degra- 
dation. 

" Where thy treasure is, there shall thy 
heart be also.'* I think to urge men and 
women to be treasure-seekers, by showing 
them that they can be treasure-finders; for 
this is the one way, so it seems to me, along 
which they will walk through life with 
courage. For the treasure of each life 
lies burled in each self, and the finding of 
that is happiness. Let us but believe in 
the possibility of realizing hope and the 
right spirit will animate us, and lead us 
on. How to discover one's self, that is 
the question. 

It is a very old question. In various 
forms it has exercised the profoundest 
minds of men; for its right answer means 
happiness. Isaiah and Christ; Plato and 
St. Paul; Marcus Aurelius and Thomas a 
Kempis; Dante and St. Francis, and the 
host of modern wise men from Bruno and 



The Right Use of Leisure 47 

Spinoza to Kant and Tolstoy set them- 
selves this question. They approached it 
from the point of view of the Idealist, and 
they granted happiness on the condition 
of the re-birth of the spirit of man. So 
convincing was their reasoning, and so 
moving was their appeal, that they did ac- 
tually awaken and change that spirit; and 
men and women began to live in new ways; 
they began to live the idea of the Broth- 
erhood of Man. 

But these wise men did not and could 
not foresee all that this change of atti- 
tude would bring about. For them, their 
answer was the complete answer and, 
therefore, there was no need to look 
further. Let us live but thus, they said, 
and all will be well with us. But life does 
not permit itself to be thus systematized 
and dogmatized, even by the great for- 
mulas of inspired hearts. Life is an evo- 
lution; it is dynamic and not static; and It 
has to be lived by men and women, not 
dreamed. Every change becomes. In ac- 
tual living, a step forward to another 
change, and while man is the product of 
his environment, he Is much more the 
maker of new environments. Indeed, 
every idea realized makes new environ- 



48 TJie Use of Leisure 

ments which, in turn, call for newer ideas, 
which again make new environments, and 
so on, continually. Every change is a 
fresh creation, and every fresh creation 
brings new desires, new aspirations, new 
problems. 

Yet these wise men were, indeed, wise 
In approaching the problem as they did; 
for they revealed the eternal character of 
the solution. New conditions may bring 
new problems, but the character of all so- 
iutions is of the quality of the spirit — the 
spirit that flowers through hope into an 
Ideal. The spirit alone leaves room for 
a revaluation of values, a reconsideration 
of the ever-evolving problems which must 
press on humanity for solution, so long as 
a humanity shall exist, and so long as men 
and women shall live together in social 
Intercourse. The spirit may be directed, 
but it may never be imprisoned; for to im- 
prison It is to cause It to lose hope and 
so prevent It flowering into Ideals, and 
we can never succeed In that. Sooner or 
later it will break open the doors and go 
on its own way. Under any conditions of 
human existence it is the man with the 
Ideal who will Inevitably be born to show 
us the way out, and to Implant a new hope 



The Right Use of Leisure 49 

in us. His method may not be practica- 
ble at the moment; but that is not to say 
it will be impossible. It will be for us, 
the living, working, hoping citizens of the 
world to make conditions fitting the Ideal; 
to realize it, and so make it a Hving truth; 
and we will do this. We will experiment 
with it at first, and, no doubt, fail in our 
experiments; but the fact that we deal 
with it at all will help us to understand 
its nature, and help us also to do our best 
with it, and in doing our best with it, to 
find ourselves in the end free to live it 

We are, and we take a pride in saying 
It, a practical people. Ideas have to fit 
conditions or we have no use for them. 
We care not a fico for a mere idea, the 
idea that cannot be embodied as a working 
principle or a working machine. Yet we 
are not altogether materialists. We do 
confess and thankfully acknowledge that 
ideas have been embodied, both as ma- 
chines and nations. The American na- 
tion is itself the outcome of an idea — the 
idea that all men are created equal with 
unalienable God-given rights to life, lib- 
erty and the pursuit of happiness. Why 
is it that we are so suspicious of, and so 
averse from, ideals? Is it because they 



50 TJie Use of Leisure 

are not practicable? But how can we de- 
cide if we do not make the trial? The 
true reason for our aversion and suspicion 
is that we are not Idealists enough. The 
soundest Idealist is the intense Realist who 
understands that matter is the medium for 
the expression of the spirit. We expect 
from a machine no more than what we In- 
tended it to do; but from an Ideal we ex- 
pect everything at once, forgetting that we 
alter it in the very act of reaHzIng it. 
Every Ideal must, necessarily, become de- 
graded In its embodiment as a Real. The 
spirit knows more than the body can ex- 
press. We make no allowance for this; 
and yet we go to the opposite extreme 
when we have found a Practical Ideal. 
For then we become so enamored of Its 
" truth " and " validity " that we hedge It 
round with precedent, root it In what we 
are pleased to call the constitution of 
things, and leave It no freedom for devel- 
opment. We are so loyal to the truth, as 
we call It, that we make an idol of It. 
We miss the spirit and see only the letter. 
Like the Israelites of old, we forsake the 
living God and become idolaters. And 
our conforming attitude Is so determined 
that we count non-conformity a heresy, dc- 



The Right Use of Leisure 51 

serving even of a punishing condemnation. 
Hence the martyrs of history and the 
bloodshed of revolutions. We are not 
Idealists enough, because we fail to under- 
stand that there Is no limit to the work of 
realizing Ideals, if only we allow the 
Ideals to teach us how. 

*' The spirit of man," says Mr. Lowes 
Dickinson finely, " is not frozen in ice, nor 
bound on a wheel of fire; rather It moves 
on a magic car through the forest of life, 
drawn by the team of Instinct, habit, de- 
sire, and will; bound to the past, yet free 
of the future; proceeding from the brute 
but tending to the god." The wise prac- 
tical sociologist will think long before he 
lightly rejects any message of this spirit, 
for the time will surely come when its 
message will be the one truth to which he 
will be compelled to give heed. 

It requires time for the vital values of 
even a single Ideal to become exhausted 
In practice; but long before that time Is 
reached, the new conditions brought about 
by the new practice engenders a new Ideal. 
A wise man or a poet, a Bergson or a 
George Meredith, is appearing on the 
horizon, who Is coming to ask us to take 
thought again. This is just what is tak- 



52 The Use of Leisure 

ing place to-day. The practical Ideal of 
political freedom under which we have 
lived for a century and a half has pro- 
duced a new kind of citizen — the average 
man alive and alert to every chance that 
will benefit him; the successful man radi- 
ant in the glory of his conquest over na- 
ture. A new assertiveness, a new selfish- 
ness, or a new form of the old selfishness, 
has sprung from this life of political free- 
dom. The old physical might has been 
translated into terms of wealth, into 
phrases of legal cunning and into shib- 
boleths of political craft. These are now 
the powers, those very powers the evil 
working of which it was thought Democ- 
racy had scotched. With political free- 
dom to permit them the opportunity, the 
powerful concentrate all their masterly 
abilities of machinery and brain to the ac- 
quisition of power for themselves. When 
they succeed, either as capitalists, corpora- 
tion lawyers, or political party *' bosses,'* 
they use it after much the same fashion as 
did the feudal barons in the days of old. 
So the old problems of class distinction 
and inequality in living come up once more 
in a new form, and once again men are no 
longer equal, no longer free, and no longer 



The Right Use of Leisure 53 

happy. The Ideal of political freedom, 
evidently, does not suffice for the new con- 
ditions; it is not working well; we are 
ready for a new Ideal. This new Ideal 
Is what leisure must be used for to find 
out. 

GVe shall never enjoy what we have un- 
less we use it. The possession of lei- 
sure, means, therefore, the use of leisure.'] 
To enjoy leisure is, however, only one of 
the ways of using it. It is a very good 
way; perhaps, the best of all ways, but like 
all good things, it offers the temptation of 
its abuse, especially to those who have not 
been accustomed to having good things. 
And nowhere is this abuse more flagrant 
than In this country, where the acquisition 
of wealth has produced a leisured class, 
more particularly among women, who, 
amply supplied with the means of satisfy- 
ing their material wants, and with no 
other objects in life, are rapidly degener- 
ating physically and spiritually. A de- 
bilitating ennui has left them a prey to 
their desires for mere variety and excite- 
ment; they pass their days In hyster- 
ical demands and neurasthenic cravings. 
They ask for love, and they " shove crav- 
ings in the van of love,*^ and so never 



54 The Use of Leisure 

meet love. These, happily, are the excep- 
tions. There are very many women of 
leisure who are begging for something to 
do, that shall justify them in their pos- 
sessions and make life mean something for 
them. 

To those, however, who spend a por- 
tion of each day in labor, leisure will 
come as a pleasant interlude for other 
than sullen idlenesss or riotous living. I 
have said that leisure is time, and that to 
give a poor man time is to enrich him. 
Shall he then waste his wealth in debili- 
tating pleasures? Or, shall he not rather 
spend it like one who knows what he 
wants? Leisure was once a hope; shall he 
not rather justify the fulfilment of his hope 
by his use of his possession? For this 
new wealth also is power, and power is for 
good as well as for evil. It was the evil 
use of power by others which denied him 
of his wealth of time; shall he now deny 
himself of the fruits of his wealth by using 
it evilly also? Would that not rather jus- 
tify depriving him of it again? Surely, it 
would. There devolves, then, on the 
leisure-enriched workingman the duty of 
the right use of leisure, the right use of 
his wealth of time. The right use of this, 



The Right Use of Leisure 55 

as the right use of everythuig in this world, 
is to make the most of it. 

How shall he make the most of leisure? 

In two ways. First, by getting health 
and keeping it; and, second, by getting a 
mind and using it. "Give a man health 
and a course to steer," says Bernard Shaw, 
"and he'll never stop to trouble whether 
he's happy or not." Health is that con- 
dition of the body which enables it to 
respond immediately and alertly to every 
call made on it by the will. The condi- 
tion is largely the result of temperance. 
Getting a mind is translating the fine 
impulses of the heart into the reasoned 
language of humanity. 

There are many ways by which to get 
health; doctors are telling us of these ways 
every day; but the best way to get health 
is to keep healthy, and to keep the body 
healthy requires a healthy mind. One 
reason why we are in the distressful state 
of to-day is that there are so few healthy 
minds in the community, although our 
colleges are gymnasiums for athletics and 
the nurseries of sports. A healthy mind 
will compel the body to be free from sick- 
ness and disease; for half our sicknesses 
are due to our sick minds — minds that are 



56 TRe Use of Leisure 

unable to will, and powerless to command; 
minds made anxious and worried and dis- 
tressed by the fear of poverty and the fear 
of disgraceful death. A healthy mind is 
a sane mind; an honest plumber and an 
honest sanitary inspector are more desir- 
able to it than a famous physician. It 
believes in the prevention of disease 
rather than in its pathology. It makes 
for courage and exalted willingness in 
momentous enterprises, especially in the 
great enterprise of bearing children. It 
will see that the body is healthy before it 
permits it the high adventure of founding 
a home; and it will act thus according to 
the dictates of its own high sense of re- 
sponsibility. It is the ignoble fathers and 
unwilling mothers who are responsible for 
the moral bastards, the spawn of sensu- 
ality that scatter disease and death, and 
that complicate our problems to the point 
of pessimism. No, we need have little 
anxiety about the health of our bodies if 
we first make certain that our minds are 
healthy. 

How then are we to get healthy minds? 
Well, one sign of mental health and sanity 
was getting leisure. In getting this we 
prepared, so to speak, the soil of the mind 



The Right Use of Leisure 57 

for the planting of fertile seeds. With 
leisure the mind has the time in which to 
recuperate itself. But there is still an- 
other process, a refining process, through 
which this soil must pass, in order that the 
life-giving air of freedom may reach its 
every particle. This process I call emo- 
tionalizing the intellect and intellectualiz- 
ing the emotions. We must think with 
emotion and feel with discretion, as Mr. 
Charles Ferguson would say. The mind 
functions as Intellect and Emotion. Pure 
emotion is passion let loose ; it is a seeing, 
a loving, a hoping impulse, a boundless 
enthusiasm and not a constructive force. 
Pure intellect is power let loose; it is a 
constructive force, but it is a blind force, 
for it sees with the outward eye only. 
When the emotions are rationalized, they 
are guided; when the intellect is emotion- 
alized, it is saved. A pure enthusiasm 
and a pure power will thus have had im- 
parted to them the fine qualities of each 
other. In the individual the resultant 
force invents machines, paints master- 
pieces of art, writes inspiring poems, 
erects splendid cathedrals, converts people 
to new faiths, heartens them with new 
aspirations, builds happy homes, and 



58 The Use of Leisure 

brings up strong-bodied, noble-minded 
citizens. In a people as a whole this re- 
sultant force is known as civilization. A 
civilized people is thus in itself a creating 
force. It demonstrates this by realizing 
ideals, by making real the dreams of its 
poets, utilizing for communal purposes 
the machines of its inventors, embodying 
in its political and social life the systems 
of its statesmen and the organizations of 
its industrial leaders; making stable and 
abiding in happy homes the purposes of 
Its fathers and mothers. It has no 
Church, it is itself a Church; it has only a 
religion — that communal binding desire 
to bring about individual happiness 
through the general welfare. It does all 
these things, or it aims to do them, by 
subduing the natural self-seeking tenden- 
cies of its Individual members for the 
purpose of social well-being, for the 
healthy organic growth of a community In 
which the individual serves It and it him. 
Now there are two sides to social life 
— - the political and the economic. The 
political side deals with the rights to per- 
sonal "freedom of the Individual members 
within the community, and the sanctions 
by which these rights are prevented from 



The Right Use of Leisure 59 

Interfering with the solidarity of the 
social state. The best practical Ideal so 
far developed by civilization for this pur- 
pose Is Democracy — the government of 
the people, by the people, for the people 
— resulting In so-called political freedom. 
The economic side deals with the rights of 
the individual to enjoy the fruits of the 
earth and the products of his labor. This 
is economic freedom, the new Ideal which 
Leisure must make possible in the future. 
So far, to satisfy, this side, civilization 
has evolved the method known as com- 
petition, a practical Ideal when carefully 
limited to its proper sphere of activity, 
but when allowed free play, as It has been 
allowed, the rights of the Individual to 
enjoy the fruits of the earth and the prod- 
uct of his labor are obtained at the cost of 
his life. Instead of making for economic 
freedom It has resulted in the unrestrained 
scramble of a medley of Individuals, each 
trying to get the better of the other, and 
the rights of one obtained at the cost of 
the sacrijRce of the rights of the other. 

Modern civilization has failed to make 
good Its claim to its title. Its political 
freedom Is a dead letter, and Its economic 
freedom an infernal machine. It has 



6o The Use of Leisure 

failed from two causes. The first is to be 
found in the purely intellectual considera- 
tion it gave to the problem of economic 
freedom. It applied the same method to 
the solution of this problem as It did to 
that of political freedom. This was the 
profound error. Economic freedom is 
the life and happiness of the members of 
a community, and life and happiness are 
not subject-matters for poHtlcal science, 
but for ethics. Politics is the science of 
the statics of a society; economics is its 
dynamics. Every economic problem is, at 
bottom, a problem in morals; a problem 
of a social body in progressive motion; a 
problem of souls. This we are only be- 
ginning to see, but we shall see it better 
when our Intuitions form a part of our 
reasoning; for then we shall not treat men 
and women as if they were the figured- 
blocks in a calculating machine. 

" Farther, deeper, may you read, 
Have you sight for things afield, 
Where peeps she, the Nurse of seed, 
Cloaked, but in the peep revealed; 
Showing a kind face and sweet; 
Look you with the soul you see't." 

We have not looked for the " kind face 
and sweet" with our souls, because, for- 



The Right Use of Leisure 6i 

sooth, our economic science must not be 
concerned with matters that pertain to the 
souls of people; as if the science of social 
life were as impersonal and bloodless as 
mathematics or as logic. How are we 
ever to settle social questions if we leave 
out the souls of the people? It is not of 
stone and timber, said Plutarch, that we 
must build the ramparts of our cities, but 
of the brave hearts of our citizens. 

The second cause for this failure on the 
part of modern civilization lies in the fact 
that it is not civilized enough; it has not 
yet had the material with which to work. 
The problem of economic freedom de- 
pends absolutely on the healthy-minded 
citizens themselves, and healthy-minded 
citizens are possible only In a community 
which permits its members the enjoyment 
of leisure, and offers every facility for 
its right use. A civilized nation without 
civilized citizens. If that were possible, is 
like an Atlantic liner with an Incompetent 
crew to work her and with her coal-bunk- 
ers empty. She is splendidly fitted with 
the best modern machinery, but she is 
adrift on the ocean because wanting in 
the willing power of cooperative thought. 
She may have a superior minded captain 



4 



62 The Use of Leisure 

and officers, but these are helpless without 
a superior minded crew. The right use 
of leisure is to educate the average citi- 
zen to be high-minded. Leisure pro- 
duced the high-minded aristocrat, the 
lover of art and the patron of genius; the 
simple-hearted lover of nature; there Is 
no reason why it should not also produce 
the high-minded citizen, with equal power 
to appreciate and encourage art and 
genius, and with even greater power to 
maintain them, and greater desires for the 
free-play of innocent natural Instincts. 
And with his arrival our problem of eco- 
nomic freedom will be solved. 

Stated broadly the right use of leisure 
IS to fit ourselves so that we always have 
the power to enjoy it. In other words, 
the right use of leisure is to maintain 
our ability to live it joyously. The ability 
to use anything is measured by the results 
of the use; If the results work well, they 
are desirable, and our right to the use of 
leisure will be justified and may not be 
alienated from us. Leisure, therefore, Is 
our opportunity to demonstrate our fitness 
for its enjoyment. No individual and no 
nation. In the history of man, ever yet 
maintained a right to anything without the 



The Right Use of Leisure 63 

power to use the right. Even a mechanic 
may not work at his trade unless he proves 
himself able; he will be discharged, de- 
prived of his right, so to speak, if he Is 
unable. Leisure is time in which to culti- 
vate ability; to learn how to be able. 
Once we are able, questions of economic 
freedom, communal welfare and human 
happiness will meet their answers; for our 
might will be right In the only sense that 
counts. 

Now what do we find existing In this 
country to-day, among the so-called " idle 
rich " and ** laboring poor.*' The former 
have the right to leisure, but they have 
lost the power to use it. Indeed, as the 
phrase goes, they have no use for It. 
The right means nothing to them, for they 
do not know what to do with it. They 
are able to live at all only by the power 
stored up In their wealth, and even this 
power they are so abusing that It also Is 
being threatened. What an opportunity 
lost! What a mighty example might not 
these become in the community! And 
they are unable to make a change because 
they too, have lost their Innocence of 
heart, and are without ho{)e. The " la- 
boring poor " have the right to the vote, 



64 The Use of Leisure 

but not knowing how to use it they have 
lost the right. They sold It long ago for 
a mess of pottage to demagogues and 
political " bosses." And they have now 
no power In the community, and no right 
to the right. Nay, they have no right 
even to complain of their condition. 
What IS left of their right is the mere 
record of its acquisition; a witness to their 
shameful incapacity and futility, and self- 
wrought misery. 

When leisure shall be given us it will 
be the time In which both " Idle rich " and 
" laboring poor " alike may take thought. 
The former, that they may rise up from 
the " mattress grave " of their ennui ; the 
latter that they may cease complaining, 
and open their eyes to what they have 
done to themselves, and to what they can 
do to redeem themselves. 

We are now asking for a new right — 
the right to economic freedom. We may 
go on asking until the Day of Judgment, 
and we will not get it. For what guar- 
antee can we give that we will not abuse 
this right also? How can we ask to be 
entrusted with it when we have no power 
to keep it, and have lost even the right to 
ask for it? There is now no other way 



The Right Use of Leisure 65 

left to us but to deserve it. Yet to de- 
serve It is no light task; it means educa- 
ting ourselves to a true understanding of 
the trust, and acquiring the ability to hold 
it Only thus shall we regain the power; 
there is no other way. Complaining, beg- 
ging, and petitioning will not avail; what 
will avail, is doing. The doors of the 
Temple of Freedom are closed to the 
mentally unsound and the morally unclean. 
We have had these doors shut against us 
because of our weakness and our sins. 
We have thought too much and played 
too little. They will not be open again 
to us until we shall have fasted, and 
afflicted our souls, and washed pure our 
hearts. So that our day of leisure must 
be for us a Day of Atonement, also. " It 
Is a Sabbath of solemn rest unto you, and 
ye shall afflict your souls." We have been 
unfaithful to the high spirit of our fore- 
fathers; we have bartered the freedom 
they gave their lives to obtain for mere 
shekels of silver. All of us — " idle 
rich " as well as " laboring poor " — have 
sinned; and In this time of leisure we 
must " highly resolve " to live new lives. 
Not by professions of faith, but by living 
of faith. Our libraries are filled with 



66 The Use of Leisure 

fourth of July professions, and yet our 
hearts continue to be broken by fifth of 
July repudiations. Let us find out, on this 
day of leisure, what it is that has ailed 
and is ailing us ! Why it is that we have 
gone wrong; and how we may regain our 
hearts and renew our hopes? 

What, after all, is the one thing in 
which every man fulfils himself and takes 
most delight in doing? It is transmut- 
ing the thinks of his mind into things of 
matter; it is realizing himself by placing 
there, outside of him, his own creation for 
all to enjoy; it is making good. This is 
what I mean by realizing ideals — it is 
man's evolution, by means of creation. 
To plant gardens where before there were 
deserts; to build cities on lonely prairies; 
to make highways of bridges from peak 
to peak; to embody hope-giving visions in 
poems and paintings; to establish schools 
where children are taught how to be gen- 
tlemen and gentlewomen; to rear true- 
hearted sons and daughters; these are the 
incarnations of his soul that stand for him 
and point to him as the maker of worlds. 
Thus is he the Master of Change, the 
filler of space with the stuff of Reality; 
thus he immortalizes himself, and thus he 



I 



The Right Use of Leisure 67 

endures. He also can then look upon the 
work of his hands and say, " It is good." 
He can say it, because he has " made 
good." Making good is the free man's 
part — it is his happiness, and there is no 
other happiness. 

The " idle rich " are wretched, because 
they are not making good. The " labor- 
ing poor " are unhappy, because they can- 
not made good. The " idle rich " are not 
making good because they do not use their 
time for creative ends. The " laboring 
poor '* cannot make good because they 
have not had the leisure in which to learn 
how to create. Yes, this " making good " 
is the only happiness, for it is conscious- 
ness of life itself. It is not experienced 
by the " idle rich " because they squander 
their lives, and are, therefore, never 
conscious of life. It is not experienced by 
the " laboring poor " because they are not 
permitted to use their life; it is bought 
and sold for others' uses. They also are 
thus never conscious of what it is to live. 
This abuse of time is at the root of all 
human sorrow; life is then but a mere 
current of existence in which we are either 
drowned or made to serve as the planks of 
a raft on which others shall float. 



68 The Use of Leisure 

Our freedom Is a very Ariel of a sprite 
who has to be continually liberated from 
the cleft In the pine tree of sloth or It will 
remain Imprisoned by the witch of our 
contentment and complacent habit. 
There must be no Idleness for the free 
man, or he will become the slave of his 
condition and the victim of the Caliban of 
capital and implacable selfishness. The 
dire foe of freedom is automatism, the 
mere response to stimuli from without; a 
blind unconscious movement, moving only 
by the compulsion Inherent In life itself. 
Automata are the slaves of formulas, even 
of the formulas of freedom. But It is 
the mark of the truly free man that he Is 
continually making fresh formulas, and in 
this way expressing his ever-evolving self; 
that he is continually striving to transcend 
his formulas, to translate them into fresh 
manifestations of life. The price of free- 
dom Is ceaseless activity and continued 
vigilance that we do not become im- 
prisoned in our formulas of freedom; for 
there is no final formula of life. " The 
letter kills the spirit," says Bergson, with 
a profound application of the phrase. 
" And our most ardent enthusiasm, as 
soon as it is externalized into action, Is so 



The Right Use of Leisure 69 

naturally congealed into the cold calcula- 
tion of interest or vanity, that one takes 
so easily the shape of the other, that we 
might confuse them together, doubt our 
own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if 
we did not know that the dead retain for 
a time the features of the living." The 
dead are the lovely creations of our life of 
freedom which have become devitalized 
through our reckless neglect and our self- 
ish sloth. Our Declaration of Independ- 
ence is just such a lovely dead. We must 
see to it that we allow nothing to die; that 
the moment following the formulation of 
an activity shall be the moment for a new 
formulation of a new activity. That is 
what freedom compels if we are to con- 
tinue free. And that is what we have 
never understood; and because we have 
not understood it we are now the slaves of 
pitiless precedent, the slaves of worn-out 
systems, and the slaves of ruthless power. 
Our activities have been hitherto spas- 
modic and therefore cataclysmic in their 
efforts. We moved only when we could 
no longer suffer imprisonment by imposed 
dogmas and ingrained habits. This was 
not living the free current and flux of life; 
it was to be flotsam and jetsam on the 



70 The Use of Leisure 

v/aves of Its river, pieces of Inert matter 
that Interrupted the flow and Impeded Its 
progress. But the free man sets new 
precedents, discards old systems and en- 
thrones power in the High Courts of Hu- 
manity only. The free man Is " master 
of his fate and captain of his soul." He 
does not Interrupt the flow of life's cur- 
rent, but willingly swims with It and will- 
ingly breasts its waves. This wiUing 
power is the creative activity in which the 
free man realizes his happiness; In which, 
indeed, he endures. I call It Work, the 
Creator. 

We can never understand the mystery 
of life, for to understand it means to get 
outside of life, and we are always in It. 
But we can have faith In Its fruitfulness 
for us, and in our happiness in It. Life 
Itself assures us of this faith In our Intui- 
tive conviction of being able to make 
good. Freedom confirms this assurance 
in that It gives us the right to make good. 
It Is the possibility of making good, which 
freedom in life offers us, that Is so inspir- 
ing. It gives us Hope — not the hope 
of the drowning for aid, but the hope of 
the living in a conscious free activity for 
self-reaHzatlon. Hope Is thus the Inward 



The Right Use of Leisure 71 

state of the soul which complements the 
outward state of the body known as free- 
dom. Only a free people can hope; for 
only a free people have the chance to 
make good. Hope is the movement of 
the soul to the making of ideas which 
freedom compels the body to make real. 
Hope is not a looking upward, for a look- 
ing upward is a reliance on another's 
strength; nor is it altogether a looking 
forward. It is partly that, but it is 
partly also a looking backward and a 
bending forward. It builds out of the 
debris of experience the images of beauti- 
ful things which it will inspire the free 
body to make real. The Past never dies; 
It is the living womb of the Future ; it lives 
to be the nourisher and sustainer of the 
child of Hope. Hope places us on the 
ramparts of the Past, and compels us to 
bend forward to the opening of the Future 
into which we are to project ourselves. 
The ages are linked with each other — 
Past, Present and Future — linked to- 
gether by Hope. I see its simplest ex- 
pressions In the wonderful solicitude of 
the plant for Its seed, and again In the 
touching care of the animal for Its young. 
And seeing it thus I come to realize what 



72 The Use of Leisure 

Love is; for thus realized Hope is the 
spring of Love and the impulse of life. 

If we ask now what we shall do with 
leisure, I answer: Sow hopes in it; grow 
ideas of beautiful things to be done by 
us in our hours of work; dream dreams 
of joyful homes for us to establish in our 
waking days of freedom; plan living 
methods for schoolmasters and educators 
of the young; plant playgrounds in the 
centers of our cities so that we may play 
there with the children, and only with 
children, and so keep young; wander by 
rippling brooks and under blue skies over 
*' grassy vested greens," that we may learn 
to love nature and feel her response. We 
cannot hope and work at the same time, 
so we must have leisure which shall be the 
breeding-time of hope. If we are look- 
ing for immediate subject-matters for 
hope, I point to the condition of the poor, 
the condition of the laborer, the condition 
of women in our social life. But, more 
definitely, I point to the education of the 
children. It is too late now to hope much 
from those who have become molded in 
the forms of custom, habit and cramping 
dogmas. All that we can do with them 
is to rouse them out of their dogmatic 



^ 



The Right Use of Leisure 73 

slumbers, and, if possible, move them by 
an appeal to their instinct of love for their 
children. It may be they will respond, if 
but out of fear for the future welfare of 
those of their own who are to live after 
them. With the young, however, it is 
otherwise. Here we have the very ma- 
terial for hope to work with. How to 
love them wisely; how to grow them to 
health; how to inspire them with new 
hopes, and how to endow them with the 
gift of creative power; how to keep them 
innocent and possessed of the power to 
see beauty; these are questions which 
leisure will help us to answer. And all 
the leisure of a generation to come will 
not be too long in which to find the right 
answers. We shall have done much if we 
find but the line of direction, the tendency 
of the right method. But let us first see 
to it that we are ourselves free to look for 
it; that we are not manacled by established 
convention, nor chained to the rock of con- 
demning habit. When we are thus free 
our faith will rise up in us, our hope will 
impel us, and both faith and hope will ride 
buoyant on the life current of love. 

It is the pathos of our present economic 
and social conditions that we, who are 



74 ^he Use of Leisure 

suffering under them may not live to see 
realized the new conditions that will 
leave room for human happiness. But 
it is, nevertheless, a great joy for us 
to feel that we are helping the coming 
of the change. We are, like Moses, 
prevented by our disobedience to 
the laws of life from entering the 
Promised Land; but the redeeming love 
in our natures grants us the privilege to 
stand on the Pisgah height of our leisure- 
built Hope and view the goodliness of the 
land from afar. If we may not enter it, 
we can, at any rate, make broad and firm 
the roads that lead to it, and so make easy 
the march of our children who are des- 
tined to inhabit it. On the road of leisure 
we are pioneers through the Land of the 
Ideal, and some day, our children will 
found cities of freedom and happiness on 
the broad acres we have cleared. In the 
meantime, our hope fills us with courage 
and we take heart in a new and an inter- 
esting enterprise — the adventure in 
search of buried treasure; the treasure 
that lies buried in life itself, and awaits 
only the work of our hands to be dis- 
covered in our realized hopes. If we do 
not find the treasure we shall, at least, 



The Right Use of Leisure 75 

have enriched ourselves with the experi- 
ence of the voyage and the joy of dangers 
overcome, and in the end, perhaps, find 
that Hfe was worth the Hving after all. 

I seem to hear my ingenious friend and 
critic saying: "What you urge is all 
very good, but it will take a long time to 
make civilized and innocent citizens for 
your civilized community. How is the 
poor man to be helped in the meantime? '* 
I can only answer with another question: 
Will the poor man be worse off with 
leisure than he is now without it? No 
one can help him if he will not help him- 
self. If he Is content to remain unhappy 
he, probably, finds some dull comfort In it, 
and In that case he will not thank us for 
disturbing him. But I do not believe that 
any citizen of these United States is that 
kind of a man. The history of this coun- 
try would not be what it Is were its people 
so utterly helpless. On the contrary, over 
and over again, they have never failed to 
respond highly when high Issues were at 
stake; and they always made good. That 
is why Hope has a chance here that It has 
not in any other country. But this land 
IS so goodly, so bountifully blessed with 
nature's richest gifts, that It Is difficult for 



76 The Use of Leisure 

them to realize as yet that there is not 
enough for all. It is difficult for them to 
see that there is an economic problem 
pressing for solution, when they are 
blinded and misled by mountainous statis- 
tics which place their country at the head 
of the list in industrial prosperity and 
power. Their leaders are political party 
men who have the welfare of party more 
at heart than the happiness of the com- 
munity; and these, for good reasons of 
their own, will never enlighten them if 
even they themselves see the existing 
situation. 

And, indeed, there is no need for 
poverty or want and its consequent misery. 
There is enough and more, for all, if we 
will but see to it that each man has fair 
play and a square deal, and that the game 
of life be played according to the rules 
of honor. If leisure be the gentleman's 
privilege, as we are told it is, let us all be 
gentlemen. Instead of competing against 
each other for the largest possession of 
wealth, let us compete for the best expres- 
sion of self. Our public schools, colleges 
and universities are the proper places for 
obtaining the right understanding of this 
kind of competition; but, unfortunately, 



The Right Use of Leisure 77 

they are not so advantaged as to be freed 
from the dogmatism of system on the one 
hand, and the pressure of the demands of 
business Hfe on the other. The humani- 
ties are sacrificed to the inhumanities, so 
that education is directed to fitting a young 
man for fighting others rather than for 
fighting himself — fulfilling himself. 
This system of making business soldiers 
out of our college undergraduates re- 
quires that the faculties be composed of 
professional drill sergeants, and that the 
presidents be executive business men. 
The undergraduate's sense of noblesse 
oblige is, therefore, neither stimulated by 
example nor nursed by tutorial compan- 
ionship. Instead, he is taught to be alert 
and quick to seize an advantage and to 
keep it at any price, and his home life ac- 
centuates the teachings. So that when, 
later, he takes his own place in the march 
of life, he is unable to impose on himself 
the laws of honor in his business dealings, 
but falls in line with the rest, and succeeds 
by taking advantage of others' failings 
rather than by any positive virtue of his 
own. Place a Harvard, a Yale, or a 
Princeton graduate in Wall Street, or in 
business, or in any of the professions, and 



78 The Use of Leisure 

In six months he will either be a failure 
and move out West (where he ought to 
have gone at the outset), or he will be un- 
dlstlngulshable from the rest of the fight- 
ing, scrambling, chicaning crowd. It Is 
not his fault; It Is his misfortune, and our 
misfortune also. He Is the product of the 
competitive system that makes things dear 
and human souls cheap — that sets more 
store on goods than It does on goodness — 
that prefers to make a man into a machine 
rather than train him to be a gentleman. 
If only we placed more value on a soul 
than we do on a cent, we would very 
quickly bring about such a condition of 
things as would make poverty Impossible, 
and the right to life, liberty and the pur- 
suit of happiness a real possession. 

Here Is the opportunity for the women 
of leisure, If they are truly In earnest In 
their desire to do something with their 
wealth of time. They can begin at the 
foundation, with the children before they 
are placed In the keeping of the profes- 
sional educators. They can make their 
homes sacred temples redolent of an at- 
mosphere that will ever cling to their chil- 
dren wherever they go, and ever arouse 
memories in them that will stay them 



The Right Use of Leisure 79 

In their times of temptation and encourage 
them in their moments of despair. They 
can interest themselves actively in bring- 
ing about new conditions in the homes of 
the poor to see to it that mothers are fit 
to feed their own children, or that these 
children have other nourishing milk. 
They need not to establish new organiza- 
tions, for the Children's Aid Society is a 
splendid existing organization. There Is 
a large fund of living enthusiasm to draw 
from for this most necessary work, and if 
they will but enter into it in the right 
spirit, the coming generation will bless 
them. The right education of the poor 
children in our large cities is the one most 
crying need. Let them address them- 
selves to that with their wonder-working 
power, and a fine beginning will have been 
made to the right use of their leisure. 
We must not expect such work to be done 
by either the state or any public body. It 
will have to be carried on by private en- 
terprise, and rightly so. For this is the 
one sure way by which practical ideals are 
finally precipitated. And it Is good for 
the private people themselves that it 
should be so done. Self-forgetfulness in 
a noble enterprise is a fine habit to 



8o The Use of Leisure 

acquire; it makes gentlemen and gentle- 
women. This is not the work for leaders 
or captains ; it is the work for us all. 

The reveille must be sounded by those 
in our own ranks who have not fallen 
asleep in the night. One bugle call here, 
another call there, a repeated call further 
beyond, and soon the hills will resound 
from the Alleghanies to the Rockies, and 
the people will know that it is morning; 
that the dawn of a new day has broken in 
which they will no longer leave their work 
to be done by faithless delegates and das- 
tard representatives, but in which they will 
gird up their loins and fight the good 
fight, themselves. 



Ill 

WORK, THE CREATOR 

" The primitive steam-engine, as New- 
comen conceived it," writes Bergson in 
that remarkable work, L'Evolution 
Creatrice, " required the presence of a 
person exclusively employed to manipulate 
the taps by which the steam was let into 
the cylinder and by which the cold spray 
was injected to condense the steam. It is 
related that a boy employed at this task, 
and becoming very tired of having to do 
it, conceived the idea of tying the handles 
of the taps, by cords, to the beam of the 
engine. Then the machine opened and 
closed the taps ; the machine worked by it- 
self. Now, if an observer had compared 
the structure of this second machine with 
that of the first, without considering the 
two boys charged with looking after them, 
he would have found but a slight differ- 
ence of complexity between them. That 
is, indeed, all we can see when we look 
only at the machines. But if we glance 

8i 



82 The Use of Leisure 

at the two boys we shall see that while one 
IS wholly occupied In watching his machine, 
the other Is free to play as he chooses, and 
that from this point of view the difference 
between the two machines Is radical, the 
first holding the attention captive, the 
second giving It freedom." 

The anecdote and the comment on it 
admirably Illustrate the ultimate purpose 
of machinery, which Is to set us free; to 
give us the opportunity to play, or to do 
anything else we choose to do. It is to 
emancipate us from drudgery; to give us 
back our lives in which to fulfil ourselves 
— in which to work, if we so will. 

The genius for Invention so splendidly 
manifested in these days, especially in the 
United States, Is, if we look at it aright, 
the profoundest potential for civilization 
at our command. Its efflorescence in the 
marvelous machinery now used In almost 
every branch of industry, marks the present 
age as the beginning, of a new era. From 
now on, civilization should be certain, be- 
cause machines will enable us to free our- 
selves from Nature's enmeshing net of 
Necessity. We have conquered Space 
and mastered Time. We have made 
Time our servant, and henceforth, Time 



Work, the Creator 83 

must wait on us, not we on it. We have 
liberated ourselves from the drudgery of 
life, and we are now, for the first time in 
our history, in a position to enjoy leisure 
— in a word, to live. We also now have 
the time in which to take the initiative; in 
which we will create. It was Nature's 
turn hitherto; she did what she liked with 
us. It shall be our turn now; we shall do 
what we like with ourselves. We hold 
the Book of Fate on our laps; we must 
turn its iron leaves with our own hands. 

We do not realize, it seems to me, this 
great blessing of machinery. If we did 
we should see how mistaken and short- 
sighted we have been in abusing and con- 
demning it for taking the bread out of our 
mouths. It is not machinery, but we and 
our economic system, the outcome of our 
stupidity and selfishness, that are to blame 
for its baneful effects. We have mis- 
applied machinery to Individual ends In- 
stead of using it, as It was intended it 
should be used, for social ends. Think of 
it! It does almost anything and every- 
thing for us, from bringing bread into our 
homes to vibrating the earth's atmosphere 
with our thoughts. It clothes us, feeds 
us, heals us, amuses us, sings for us, trans- 



84 The Use of Leisure 

ports us, thinks for us, digs for us, cleans 
for us, lights up our cities, warms our 
houses, and records our deeds. It is our 
servant in the completest and most satisfy- 
ing sense. Half our lifetime might be 
saved for us by these household fairies of 
ours. And yet we are still drudging and 
wasting life In ignoble toil. We may re- 
call the Southern negro who, when he first 
saw a freight train, exclaimed: "Well, 
de white man he done fust free de nigger 
and now he done free de mule ! " But 
the white man has not freed himself. He 
IS still drudging; still tied to the mortar- 
wheel grinding out a living. In spite of 
the countless time-saving labors machinery 
performs for us, labors we once had to 
spend our lives doing ourselves, we still 
have no time to spare, we say. No time 
to spare ! Why, if we did but utilize this 
wonderful system of machines for time- 
saving purposes, as we have for money- 
making purposes, we should live to twice 
the span of our present number of years, 
and every added year would be a year of 
real living. Instead, we waste our genius 
and our lives in seeking after vain things. 
Surely, we have failed to read the open 
secret ! 



Work, the Creator 85 

Machinery is man's application and 
utilization of Nature for the purposes of 
communal welfare. This definition is not 
to be found in works on political economy 
or in treatises on Socialism; but it is the 
right definition, none the less. It is right, 
because it takes cognizance of the lives of 
the people. If it did not, there could be 
no apphcation possible for any definition, 
since without a people machinery has no 
meaning. It follows, therefore, that a 
community, highly endowed with machines, 
should be a community for which the nec- 
essaries of life are most quickly and most 
cheaply provided. Where this obtains, 
the community is civilized; where this does 
not obtain, the community is not civilized; 
It IS not well. It is working its own de- 
struction. The swift-footed and expert 
savage was a blessing to his tribe because 
he assured the rest food, and the tribe 
honored him. If the same savage hunted 
to satisfy his own hunger only, the tribe 
dealt summarily with him, and he lost the 
tribal advantages. The inventor of a ma- 
chine who uses it to make the necessaries 
of life cheap is a blessing to his com- 
munity, but the monopolizer is a curse to 
his community; he uses it to enrich him- 



86 The Use of Leisure 

self by making the necessaries dear. A 
community that does not deal with such 
a selfish monopolizer in the same fashion 
as the tribe did with its selfish hunter, has 
either lost its sense, or is the victim of 
some suicidal delusion. 

Our patent laws are framed on some 
recognition of this right of the community 
to the benefits of inventions, although the 
limit of time permitted for monopolistic 
exploitation before the right accrues to 
the community, is far too extended. For 
we must never forget that, however valu- 
able the invention may be, it Is the com- 
munity that gives it its value ; it Is we who 
use it ; and the more valuable the invention 
is the more quickly will the inventor be 
enriched by it, and the more quickly, there- 
fore, should the community own it. But 
our economists do not think on these lines. 
Indeed, In industrial matters, they do not 
think on social lines at all. That is the 
Incomprehensible part of our methods in 
the business of governing ourselves. We 
actually encourage monopoly and, by per- 
mitting the few to grow rich and powerful 
at the expense of the many, put off indefi- 
nitely the day of communal welfare. We 
permit parasites to feed on our blood, and 



Work, the Creator 87 

then wonder why we are debilitated and 
sick. 

And the argument applies not to inven- 
tions only, but to every organization of a 
public-utility character; for such organiza- 
tions are also inventions; applications of 
natural forces for communal welfare. 
City lighting, city watering, city transit, 
interstate transit, telegraph and telephone 
services, and public franchises of any kind 
— all these, when organized, are inven- 
tions for communal welfare. Their value 
has meaning only for a community. In- 
stead of viewing them In this light we en- 
courage private monopoly in them, and so 
keep dear those services to the community 
which ought to be as cheap as possible. 
The consequence is that we set in motion 
another force for the uneven distribution 
of wealth, and bring about other condi- 
tions which debilitate the community and 
make the general life burdensome and 
wretched. 

We are so strangely illogical, with it 
all. It would seem as if we had pre- 
meditatedly set ourselves to do things in 
ways not according to common sense. 
We decide that a city shall supply its own 
water, but it must not supply its own light- 



88 The Use of Leisure 

ing. We leave the lighting to be done by 
private monopoly. The result, of course, 
is that we, probably, pay twice as much for 
light as we fairly should pay. We con- 
clude that the state may conduct our postal 
service, but we delegate to private monop- 
olies the sending of our telegraph and 
telephone messages. The result also is 
that we, probably, pay five times more for 
our telegraph and telephone services than 
we fairly should pay. We encourage the 
growth of individual wealth among the 
few by maintaining a high protective 
tariff, but we do not encourage Independ- 
ence by protecting the savings of the poor. 
The result, again, is that the few become 
inordinately wealthy at the expense of the 
many, and the poor man is kept poor by 
being compelled either to pay more than 
he can afford for a good article, or to ac- 
cept a bad article for the price of a good 
one. This Is, to say the least of It, neither 
fair play nor a square deal. Again, 
we pension soldiers and sailors, but we 
never even dream of pensioning poor and 
deserving poets, or rewarding and en- 
couraging genius in art. The result Is, 
that our pension list has grown to such an 
enormous size that we are compelled to 



Work, the Creator 89 

tax the community to the point of imposi- 
tion to meet its demands; and our poets 
waste half their lives trying to make a 
living in the market-place with the rest, 
to the prostitution of their genius. We 
do not think much of poets, of course; 
still, we are smilingly tolerant of them. If 
they are not producers they are harmless 
and, occasionally, amusing. So we put up 
with them. And yet they have not a lit- 
tle to do with communal welfare. I am 
asking myself what the soldier-pensioners 
themselves would say of them — the sol- 
diers who chanted the Battle Hymn of the 
Republic, the soldiers who marched to 
the rousing music of patriotic hymns, and 
the soldiers, aye, and the sailors, too, who 
sing the songs that recall to them all that is 
most dear and most inspiring of their 
childhood days and the land of their 
fathers, and that touch " the mystic chords 
of memory, stretching from every battle- 
field and patriot grave to every living 
heart and hearthstone all over this land." 
It would be interesting to hear what they 
would say on the matter. As it is, we 
give poets our blessing, and pass on. 

"Blessings be with them, and eternal praise, 
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares! — 



90 The Use of Leisure 

The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays." 

But there Is a far profounder meaning 
to the inventive genius than is to be de- 
duced from viewing its products as mere 
aids to attaining industrial prosperity and 
superiority. Industrial superiority, when 
viewed as prosperity, is, at best, but a pri- 
vate advantage; it does not make for uni- 
versal contentment. The deeper meaning 
of this inventive genius lies in the fact that 
by means of it we are conquering Nature 
for our own purposes. It gives a realiz- 
able meaning to this world of ours. Here, 
in machinery. Is the new expression of life 
In terms, not of language, but of thought- 
embodied things. It Is the Interpretation 
of the seemingly meaningless unrelated 
things we call the universe, a universe 
which, as Interpreted by the logic of phi- 
losophy, has hitherto perplexed and baffled 
our poignant search. From this new point 
of view. It takes on the beauty of a scheme; 
It begins to have a real meaning and a real 
value, because it has meaning and value 
for us. The Truth is no longer a cloud- 
enshrouded, inaccessible Unknowable, but 
a daily friend who is walking with us at 
every turn of our life's march, and who 



Work, the Creator 91 

Is ready with his service at every call of 
our life's need. Looked at thus, ma- 
chinery Is the man-made embodiment of 
the Spirit of Life; the fire we have drawn 
from a real heaven and imprisoned to 
serve us on a real earth. We are Prome- 
theans. If we will but unchain ourselves 
from the rock of economic superstition, we 
may be even freed, by means of machinery, 
from the bondage of drudgery, as we have 
freed ourselves from the slavery of oppres- 
sion. But to do this we must have a new 
faith in a higher law than any we have as 
yet acknowledged. 

What is this faith in the higher law? 
I suggest Its nature In the phrase. Creative 
Work, the work that resolves and re-di- 
rects the forces of nature for the purpose 
of human happiness. Creative work is 
self-fulfilment. It Is to will In order to 
endure. It is to express matter in terms 
of spirit by expressing spirit in terms of 
matter. It is to make things out of 
thinks and to transform ideals into reals. 
Its two-fold expression Is accomplished by 
two different powers which man possesses 
— the Inventive genius on the one hand, 
and the organizing genius on the other. 
The one occupies itself with supplying the 



92 The Use of Leisure 

material necessities of life; the other more 
directly concerns Itself with liberty and 
happiness. The combined result of both, 
at any period, is the progress made; It Is 
man's evolution through self-fulfilment. 
To believe that our happiness depends on 
self-fulfilment by means of creative work 
Is the simplest statement of this faith. Its 
higher law Is that the work of our hands 
and brain Is for the just enjoyment of all. 
While there is private property In 
genius there Is no private property In 
power. Power Is a communal attribute. 
When genius Is endowed by society with 
power. It Is done for society's welfare, and 
without this endowment genius Is but a 
voice crying In the wilderness. The poet 
sings, the artist paints, the Inventor em- 
bodies, each from the compelling Impulse 
of his nature; but the song Inspires, the 
painting exalts, and the machine serves us. 
Each of these has value and meaning only 
in that It Is for us. Herein lies the virtue 
of genius — It obeys us, not we it. The 
genius Is the man's, but the power of it Is 
ours; for It is our power, the collective 
power Inherent In a community by which 
genius Is given Its virtue — by which. In- 
deed, It Is even possible. It follows, there- 



Work, the Creator 93 

fore, that this empowered virtue of genius 
if appropriated for private gain means de- 
priving us of our strength. We under- 
stand this when we ostracize the doctor if 
he keeps to himself a discovery in medi- 
cine of benefit to society. We do this be- 
cause we know his discovery Is of general 
human value and may not, therefore, be 
exploited for private gain. 

There can, furthermore, be no private 
property In the forces of nature. There 
can no more be private property in the 
wealth of nature than there can be in the 
love of God. In a profound and real sense 
one is the expression of the other; and a 
true science of economics will base its ex- 
periments on the hypothesis that one is 
the other. But as we have had interme- 
diaries between ourselves and God who 
have monopolized God's love, even to the 
selling of indulgences, so we have now 
middlemen who monopolize God's bounty, 
even to the selling of pure air. The day 
of the ecclesiastical augur is almost gone; 
the day of the economic adept will soon 
be going. In the evolution of life which 
Is of matter as well as of spirit, the least 
of us as well as the greatest are of the 
apostolic succession; and this we shall 



94 The Use of Leisure 

realize if we draw with our own hands, 
by means- of creative work, the waters of 
life. In this enterprise the poet shall show 
us the way, for he in all times has been 
the true intermediary between us and the 
God of this universe. 

Every Invention for saving time, every 
organization. for communal advantage and 
betterment, every revelation of the poet's 
seeing soul, are discoveries in the unknown 
realms of mystery. They are so many 
steps on the Stairway of Truth, so many 
solutions to the problems of existence. As 
such they are our very life. Monarchs, 
hierarchs, and plutocrats withheld from us 
the life-giving values of such discoveries. 
They denied to us the wisdom of states- 
men, the blessed messages of saints, and 
the emancipating help of creative genius. 
Disobedience to monarchs sent us govern- 
ing ourselves to the end that we are on the 
road to political freedom. Disobedience 
to hierarchs sent us thinking for and com- 
muning with ourselves to the end that we 
are discovering our souls and knowing 
God. Disobedience to plutocrats will send 
us working for ourselves to the end that 
we shall realize a life of happiness. 

It Is time we opened our eyes and took 



Work, the Creator 95 

measure of our strength. Where are the 
ingenious sons of Tubal Cain, those 
workers in iron and brass, who are re- 
shaping the earth for our purposes? 
What is become of the Prometheans who 
chain the lightning and harness the horses 
of the sun to drive our chariots of com- 
fort? I am afraid they are bound fast 
to the rock of economic dogmatism, and 
the vultures of capital and. monopoly are 
very busy feeding on their vitals. What 
simple-minded Titans we are! We are so 
entranced with the joy of creating and so 
exalted before the revelation of beauty, 
that we know not when the fowler has en- 
snared us. But he lies in wait for just 
such rapturous moments of ours, and 
henceforward we are caged. When he al- 
lows us the liberty to go on creating, and 
permits us a tiny space of time in which to 
enjoy, we bow down in gratitude for his 
magnanimity. Then 

" obedience 
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, 
Makes slaves " 

of us all. We must change this attitude 
if we are to live as free men. 

But before we take this step let us first 
make sure that we are of a mind in the 



g6 The Use of Leisure 

faith ; for it must be to us a faith not only 
worth dying for, but worth living for. 
And let us also make sure that we set 
about our task In such wise that we shall 
not have to draw back once we set our 
hands to the work. It may have been 
proper for a Voltaire to cry: ** Ecrasez 
VInfame! ^* ; but It was deplorably Im- 
proper for the bloodthirsty crowds of the 
Reign of Terror to repeat the cry. We, 
to-day, would not deserve, and could not 
keep, our lives obtained at such a cost. 
" The spirit of man Is the candle of the 
Lord," not the torch of the Devil. True 
disobedience is not expressed In dire re- 
bellion and bloody revolution; It is shown 
by obedience to a higher law than the one 
we disobey; and the right to make that is 
already ours. What we want Is a fine en- 
thusiasm In the faith of creative work, a 
veritable ecstasy similar to the mystic's in 
his understanding of God. Such an ec- 
stasy is not a cessation of our faculties, but 
a personal enhancement, an enriching of 
ourselves with the wealth of reality, a re- 
lating of ourselves to the whole life. 
Once possessed by such an enthusiasm, all 
the plutocrats and capitalists and monopo- 
lists on earth could not stand before us for 



Work, the Creator 97 

one day. For it is of the nature of the 
spirit that it disarms obstruction by em- 
bracing it, and thus resolves it to its own 
higher purposes. 

This, as I read it, is the mission of the 
United States. It is the meaning underly- 
ing Its industrial passion and Its enthusiasm 
for wealth. If industrial superiority be 
not viewed as private prosperity but as com- 
munal well-being, this gospel of creative 
work will be fraught with hope-inspiring 
messages. This also is the heartening 
message of this country as an individual 
democracy. Behind and beneath the at- 
traction it exercises on the minds of the 
enslaved proletariat of Europe, Is the feel- 
ing that here they have a chance to live 
and a chance to make good. Possibly, to 
some more exalted minds, here also they 
may solve by these very means the prob- 
lems of life and understand the perplexing 
mystery of things. The feeling may be 
born out of the mere splendor of success- 
ful achievement; yet, though It be seen as 
wealth. It Is really felt as self-realization. 
The impulse for creative work catches 
them by the throat, so to speak, and moves 
them to a desire to demonstrate their own 
ability also. And in the people themselves 



98 The Use of Leisure 

of this country, behind and beneath their 
striving for wealth-power and their poor 
worship of the almighty dollar, is the same 
ambition, the same unconscious pride urging 
them to self-realization. It may be that 
this very blind worship of the material 
and the unhappiness it causes, is the road 
along which they must travel ere they reach 
to a consciousness of what it is all for; 
ere they attain to a realization of the still 
deeper meaning of what it is they have ac- 
complished; ere they succeed in precipita- 
ting the spiritual gold secreted in their so- 
called wealth of reality. And it may be 
also that in this precipitation of the spirit- 
ual value In creative v>7ork will be born a 
religious, a binding force, between man 
and man, which shall make for a true 
communal life. 

But as matters stand to-day, they have 
freed themselves from one set of supersti- 
tions only to fall a prey to another. They 
have jumped from the frying-pan of the- 
ology and political dogmatism Into the fire 
of political economy. The dogmas of 
sects may have slain their thousands, but 
the doctrines of economic science have 
slain and are slaying their tens of thou- 



Work, the Creator 99 

sands. There would seem to be some 
spell in the word " Competition." It is 
uttered with such Podsnappian unction, as 
if there were nothing more to be said. 
But, indeed, there is a great deal more to 
be said. There is this, at least, to be said : 
that there is good competition and 
bad competition. The competition that 
cheapens things is good, but the competi- 
tion that gambles with life in order to 
cheapen things is bad; the competition that 
vies to excel is good, but the competition 
in subterfuge and sharp practice is bad; 
the competition in high enterprises is 
good, but the competition that stakes the 
lives and happiness of others against 
profits is bad. But the economic dogma- 
tist recognizes no such distinction. He 
treats human life exactly as if it were 
inorganic matter, and the formula be- 
comes a very Procrustean bed. The re- 
sult is that what virtue there is in the 
method is destroyed by its greater vice; 
the virtue is lopped off to fit the vicious 
system. So that competition means, in 
actual working, making the prices of things 
depend, not on the law of supply and de- 
mand, but on the cheapening of labor. In 



loo TRe Use of Leisure 

other words the cheapening of things is 
obtained at the cost of happiness, and, 
therefore, of life. 

I wonder what these economists would 
say If it were suggested that we try the 
good competition — the competition to 
make things cheap and human souls dear? 
Even as I write the question I seem to 
hear a very Babel of voices crying out: 
" Oh, but that Is Socialism ! That would 
never do ! " Well, we may call it by what- 
ever name we please, we shall not alter its 
truth. But It Is not Socialism; It is hu- 
manltarlanism; it is democracy, if de- 
mocracy mean anything at all. It Is what 
the Declaration of Independence stands 
for; for it is what the founders of this 
American republic fought for— -to make 
things cheap, and human souls dear, aye, 
priceless. Must we reargue the matter? 
Surely, the whole thesis is Indelibly writ in 
the annals of history, and the conclusion 
graven in the hearts of all high-minded 
democratic citizens! Where would the 
United States be to-day If its leaders had 
not been the priceless men they were? 
And why is the United States to-day not 
the democracy Its priceless men fought to 
make It? Because its leaders now are 



Work, the Creator loi 

cheap men, men with a price, men of a 
shameless plutocracy and a nameless ochloc- 
racy. This is what political economy has 
brought us to — to sell things for gold 
and to buy human souls for a pittance. 
We have so far progressed In our science 
that we can actually compute the value of 
a soul in dollars. Nay, when I descend 
into the New York Subway, during the 
so-called " rush hours," and see how, for 
the sake of a larger dividend, a railroad 
corporation carries home men, women and 
children in a way it would not dare to deal 
with cattle, I am forced to the conclusion 
that a human soul is worth even less than 
the five cents charged. Truly, a splendid 
achievement ! We have beaten Mephisto- 
pheles at his own game, and we can now 
jeer at him for being an inferior man of 
business. But Mephistopheles was not 
so profoundly versed in economic science 
as we are. He did not know the method. 
The method is simplicity itself. We open 
the competition market of labor, solemnly 
pronounce the magical abracadabra — 
" The Law of Supply and Demand " — 
and let It go at that. This is known 
among the adepts as the laissez faire 
sleight-of-tongue trick. Immediately a 



I02 TKe Use of Leisure 

scramble ensues among the laborers as to 
which shall sell himself cheapest; for life 
is precious. When it comes to the com- 
petition market of things we carefully close 
that, and employ another abracadabra. 
We do not say, or even whisper, " The 
Law of Supply and Demand " ; but we 
roar at the top of our voices: "Protect 
home industries I " This is the patriotic 
trick. Immediately things become dear, 
and souls cheap. What a confession of 
weakness ! As if the inventive genius of 
the United States still required that it be 
wrapped in swaddling cloths ! 

" Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness I " Where are the organizers and 
makers of institutions who shall weave 
these ideals into the fabric of our com- 
munal life? The ideals still lie impris- 
oned in our archives waiting for the wand 
of genius to touch them into living free- 
dom. Surely, here, if anywhere, is a suf- 
ficient inspiration for our faith ! What a 
vista of creative work spreads itself out 
before us at the mere utterance of the 
inspiring words! Shall we ever accom- 
plish all that has to be done ere these 
words are fulfilled in fact? A dumb de- 
spair overwhelms us at the question. We 



Work, the Creator 103 

take heart, however, as we touch hands 
with the inventor, with the man who is 
making Hfe less a travail; and, in good 
time, liberty and happiness will be ours 
also. Work, when it is no longer drudg- 
ery, no longer the mere driving of the 
wheels of the mills of chance in a bare hope 
of grinding some flour for bread, will then 
mean the concentrated willing effort of each 
man to be first in the race for the goal of 
self-fulfilment. In leisure he will plan the 
cities of hope, and in leisure he will build 
them. But we must have justice first — 
not the perfect justice of the all-knowing 
spirit, for that we may never obtain, but 
the plain human justice of fair play — 
the just balancing of our acts without the 
falsifying weights of selfishness, interest 
and passion in either scale. We are so 
constituted that we require to feel confi- 
dence ere we will permit ourselves to ven- 
ture. If we know we shall have fair play 
we will take the leap; otherwise, we hold 
back and hold fast to what we have by the 
meanest of subterfuges — the elemental 
animal In us comes to the top clawing for 
life. A people without justice is a peo- 
ple made desperate in dishonor, and with 
tooth and claw bared. With justice men 



I04 The "Use of Leisure 

will adventure in the highest of enterprises; 
and that Is what they must do if they are 
to be free. Adventure is the prime neces- 
sary impulse in a man's soul striving to ful- 
fil itself. It demands constant activity; 
but that is the price of liberty and happi- 
ness. For these states of our life are 
never static. Over the full heaving tide 
of the communal life of liberty the indi- 
vidual waves of our happiness form and 
re-form as part of the swelling flow. 

But freedom or liberty for what? Sim- 
ply to realize ourselves by work. That is 
happiness. We have never known happi- 
ness because we have never been free to 
work. If we have been freed from feudal 
service, we have not been freed from the 
drudging toil for " the altogether indis- 
pensable daily bread." If we have been 
liberated from tyranny, we have been im- 
prisoned by plutocracy. If we have been 
emancipated from oppression, we have 
been degraded by poverty. Always have 
we served masters, other than the im- 
perious commands of our own creative 
souls. Always have we missed liberty, 
and always have we been unhappy. We 
have longed for freedom because our na- 
tures demanded the liberty to make good, 



Work, the Creator 105 

and because we have always realized, un- 
consciously it may be, that this was the one 
way out of the afflictions which beset us. 
God was in his Heaven ; but we made it all 
wrong in the world. And our troubling 
problem has been how to make it all right 
in the world. 

But if freedom be given us, what shall 
we do with it? Freedom in itself means 
nothing; it is either an empty word, a mere 
fine-sounding term for professionalists and 
demagogues to conjure with, or it is a 
golden cup we have won with our blood in 
our race for life. But even the cup is 
empty! With what shall we fill it? 
There is still but the one answer — with 
creative work. This is the wine of life, 
the intoxicating draught of which is happi- 
ness. Craftsmen and poets and artists 
have known this in all times, and, indeed, it 
is to their labors that we to-day owe the 
hope which encourages us to look forward. 

It is true the world still requires non- 
creative work, the drudgery of unskilled 
labor and menial service; but it will be- 
come less and less necessary for human 
beings to do this drudgery the more cre- 
ative work is accomplished. It is degrad- 
ing for any man born with a mind that he 



'io6 (The Use of Leisure 

shall be compelled to drudge; for the real 
business of life is to be happy. When all 
shall be free to create, the working spirit 
will invent more and new machines to 
drudge for us, and organize newer and 
more fitting ways for living together. 
It will set itself to solve real problems: 
How to distribute the necessaries of life 
to each home and family as we now de- 
liver our mails; how to police our cities 
and erect fire-proof homes and buildings; 
how to regulate railway traffic and railway 
transport; how to systematize medical 
service in every block of a city's area ; how 
to establish and uphold courts of justice so 
that all may seek redress freely and ob- 
tain it quickly; how employment for a liv- 
ing wage shall be regulated and conducted 
with strict regard for the comfort and the 
health of the employees; how wealth shall 
not be grossly accumulated to the disturb- 
ance of the communal balance; how to es- 
tablish municipal self-government; how to 
prevent political power centering in single 
groups to the undermining of public con- 
fidence and to the sapping of communal 
fidelity; how to replace party politics by 
a living expression of the people's will; 
how to build cities where disease shall find 



Work, the Creator 107 

no soil In which to take root; how to con- 
trol our railways so that cheap commuta- 
tion shall be available to the poorest work- 
man, for at least a fifty-mile radius from 
his place of work; how a school and a 
green playground shall be built and upkept 
in every square mile of a city's space; how 
food shall be pure and cheap; how ex- 
clusive privilege shall be made Impossible; 
how the ways, and the means, for doing 
all these and the numberless other neces- 
sary things which must come up for doing 
as w6 go on living, shall be found and or- 
ganized and utilized to the utmost advan- 
tage for us. All these are matters for cre- 
ative work; for the leisure-endowed free 
men and women of the near future who 
are going to be happy in thus making good. 
It Is not dollars we want, but wealth, the 
wealth of the cooperative willing energy 
of brave and high-spirited, decent minded 
citizens. All the money In the world, 
without such cooperative wealth of minds 
and hearts, will do nothing. Indeed, it 
will do worse than nothing, for It will only 
make temptation possible to the unfaithful 
and the untrue. We do not want more 
laws; we have too many already. We 
might accomplish a large good if we sim- 



io8 (The Use of Leisure 

ply abrogated all the existing laws which 
were made by privilege to safeguard itself. 
Legislation is never salvation; it is more 
often exploitation and enervation. The 
upright man lives his life almost uncon- 
scious of laws. We want more than any- 
thing else a brave private opinion and a 
high public spirit. And in order to ob- 
tain these the organizing genius must set 
itself to create a new machinery for formu- 
lating that opinion and that spirit as a 
genuine national expression, to take the 
place of the tyrannical and degrading 
party machinery with its caucuses, which 
has robbed the citizen of his mind and is 
destroying democracy as *' the supreme 
refuge of human dignity."* 

No man dare count himself wealthy, 
though he were possessed of ten thousand 
times the income of a Rockefeller, if he 
can be brought face to face with one fel- 
low citizen who is a pauper; that pauper 
may rightly charge him with a crime 
And every man may consider himself 
wealthy if he has no fear of poverty, and 
if he be free to use the best part of each 
day's life for self-fulfilment. There is no 
necessity for poverty. It will be the busi- 

* See Ostrogorskl's Democracy, vol. li, p. 741, ed. 1908. 



Work, the Creator 109 

ness of creative work to demonstrate that 
proposition. The poor do not ask to be 
helped and to be poor; they ask for fair- 
play and a square deal. And their 
demand goes deeper than for mere tempo- 
rary relief; it goes down to the very foun- 
dations of our economic system. They also 
want their chance to make good. And, 
in this country, at any rate, they have a 
right to the chance ; for the right is graven 
for them on the tables of their law. They 
await the organizing genius who shall 
show them how to apply that law. 

Invention and organization — these are 
the two directions in which creative work 
shall exercise itself in the future. The 
one to bring down the fire from God and 
the other to realize the spirit of God. 
The former to set free men's and women's 
bodies from degrading and time-robbing 
toil; the latter to set free men's and 
women's souls from the misery of sterility. 
Evolution is fruition, and any force that 
denies fruition to any living thing is a de- 
structive force, and must be diverted or 
overcome if life is to mean anything at all. 
Fruition is the beginning of wisdom and 
the end of destiny; for it is " life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness." 



no The Use of Leisure 

I lay this stress on invention and organi- 
zation because, to borrow a suggestion 
from Bergson, the human intellect is more 
at home with tangible objects than it is 
with emotions and ideas. It is through its 
experimentation with these that the intel- 
lect arrives at the spiritual value underly- 
ing them. So that the more absorbed we 
are with things and their right uses the 
more likely are we to distil from them 
the value of life. In that sense Mr. 
Charles Ferguson's paradox states a pro- 
found truth: " Complete objectivity/' he 
says in his University Militant, " is pure 
spirituality." But this is not evident to 
us while working with our intellects only. 
The revelations of the spirit come only 
indirectly by means of Invention and or- 
ganization. They come directly from 
quite another source — from the poetic 
genius; the genius that knows without 
ratiocinative processes. And this genius 
is most vital for us in our communal life. 

I am aware that what I have written on 
this subject of Creative Work offers but 
a fresh opening in which the scientific 
economist will thrust the dagger of his 
life-taking syllogisms. That is his only 
method. He thrusts and thrusts to trace 



Work, the Creator lir 

the nerves of our communal body to their 
very sources, and tells us that he is thus 
looking for its spirit. But he finds noth- 
ing; and he leaves of the living beauty only 
a slashed corpse. It is not with the scal- 
pel or the microscope that we shall lay 
bare the eternal secret springs of the won- 
der that catches us and the desire that im- 
pels us. Put these instruments by, says 
the poet, better without them may man see 

" Stretched awful in the hush'd midnight, 
The ghost of his eternity." 

He who shall enlighten us and enhance us 
in the enlightenment is the poet whom we 
now neglect and despise, even as Homer 
enlightened and enhanced the people of 
ancient Greece. We come into the world 
and stare about us in mute wonder at the 
beauty and the moving splendor of It, and 
know not what to say. When we have 
lived long enough to ask ourselves : Why 
are we living in the midst of this beauty 
and splendor? What is this life of ours 
to express ? — our souls within us are lifted 
as by a secret power; but we still remain 
mute. Then the current of life draws us 
on and in our efforts to keep afloat we for- 
get our questionings, until some untoward 
dangers ahead of us bring them back to 



112 THe Use of Leisure 

our minds. But some few who find joy 
in the mere swimming in this current and 
drinking in the beauty and the splendor 
of the world see and understand what the 
rest do not. They see that it is all beauti- 
ful, all splendid — the struggle and the 
strugglers, the effort and the doers, the 
battle and the fighters; and to them it 
takes on the harmony of a glorious sym- 
phony. The spirit of poetry masters them, 
and they sing the epic of life. And by 
their song is precipitated the national soul. 
This is what the Bible did for the Jews; 
what Homer did for the Greeks ; what the 
Sagas did for the Northmen; and this is 
what the poet will do for us also. A 
great epic is the precipitation of a na- 
tion's soul in Its efforts to free Itself from 
the physical conditions of life toward a 
realization of its spiritual aspirations. We 
await the poet who shall so serve us. He, 
with his songs, will tell us what we, with 
our science, will never know. And we 
shall understand him because he will sing 
to our hearts. And, as we listen to him, 
we shall know that we were not born for 
misery, sorrow, and the man-making ills 
of life. 

We have great need of poets, greater 



Work, the Creator 113 

need of them than we have of even states- 
men or organizers or inventors. We are 
suffering from having forsaken the gods 
of our fathers without replacing them 
with gods of our own. Poets, by their 
creative work, keep alive the high reach- 
ings of our souls which are necessary to 
the making of gods, by immortalizing in 
nobly-moving language the great deeds of 
our great men and great women. Our 
fathers reverenced great men, reverenced 
even the simple rehcs associated with their 
names; they worshiped what to them was 
a living God because He personified the 
best impulses of their hearts; their con- 
science was touched to the quick at any 
base act or thought, whether in the world 
of affairs or in their social Intercourse 
with each other. They had a splendid 
history behind them, of a mother-country 
which linked them to a wonderful Past 
of a national life. The spirit of Numa 
sanctified their homes. To the eighteenth 
century gentlemen of Virginia, Maryland, 
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and even 
New York, the heroes of Elizabeth's day 
— the Drakes, the Gilberts, the Haw- 
kinses, the Grenvilles — were their heroes 
also. They sought and found high Inspi- 



114 TKe Use of Leisure 

ration from the Bible of King James, the 
literature of the country of Chaucer, Spen- 
ser, Shakespeare and Milton. They were 
of England with all Englishmen, and 
its glory was their glory. They leaned 
on this national spirit and took heart 
from its great exemplars, and so re- 
covered themselves in times of desperate 
stress. It stayed them, and made them 
the men they were to resist tyranny and 
oppression and base injustice even from 
England herself. And they did nobly 
and well. 

But we, of the United States of America 
to-day have determined to cut ourselves 
adrift from these traditions and to deny 
ourselves the refreshing strength of this 
national spirit. Our children, whether at 
home or at school, are no longer taught 
this Past in any vital sense. We are a 
nation of our own, we answer, and rightly 
answer, with a splendid history of our own. 
Let our children, we say, draw inspiration 
from the heroes and masters of men and 
conquerors of the earth who made the 
United States what it is to-day. But who 
is to draw for them the refreshing waters 
of this life? Are wc to expect from un- 
derpaid schoolmasters and pedagogues 



Work, the Creator 115 

and academic professors the genius of the 
epic poet? Surely history does not war- 
rant us in such an expectation. It is the 
poet we want; the poet who shall precipi- 
tate the national spirit which is behind and 
at the foundation of the wonderful achieve- 
ments of the people of this country. We 
have many volumes of Commemoration 
Odes of quite respectable literary quality; 
but we look in vain for an epic of the War 
of the Revolution which might fill each one 
of us with the heroic spirit, and bind us all 
in that living union of great-hearted hu- 
mility which Is the supreme national pride. 
We look In vain for an epic on the Great 
Civil War, with one of the greatest of 
all life's soldiers as Its hero; nor do we 
find Immortalized In ^neids those won- 
derful expeditions across this continent — 
the travels of Lewis and Clark — the set- 
tlement of the 'Forty-NIners, the opening 
up of Alaska, the reclamation of the des- 
erts, and the founding of Texas. How 
otherwise than through poetry are our 
children to possess the beauty and the 
glory and the spiritual grandeur of the 
saga-figures who founded this marvelous 
union of States; of those heroes who 
*' highly resolved " and so highly achieved? 



ii6 The Use of Leisure 

Walt Whitman chanted the song of democ- 
racy ; but his chant is a magnificent prophecy 
of an ideal — it is an exhortation, not a 
poetic manifestation. But the spirit that 
strove and is striving toward a realization 
of this democracy is best taught when ex- 
emplified in the lives and deeds of the men 
who lived and fought, who conquered and 
died fighting, moved by this spirit. This 
is the creative work of the poet we await. 
He has not come as yet, because we have 
not called for him. We have not pre- 
pared a place for him in our hearts. 

But the wonder of this country, its 
achieved desires and Its still unrealized 
Ideals, are not for one poet, but for many. 
I find a parallel In the past to the United 
States of the present. In Ancient Greece, 
at that period of its history before Athens 
had become the great centre of Hellenic 
civilization, when Greece was still in the 
making, so to speak. It was the Iliad 
that precipitated a national spirit out of 
the separate cities and made the glory of 
Greece. ** The Intensity of imagination," 
writes Professor Gilbert Murray in his fine 
analysis of the rise of Greek Epic poetry, 
" which makes the Iliad alive Is not, It 
seems to me, the imagination of any one 



Work, the Creator 117 

man. It means not that one man of genius 
created a wonder and passed away. It 
means that generation after generation of 
poets, trained in the same schools and a 
more or less continuous and similar life, 
steeped themselves to the lips in the spirit 
of this great poetry. They lived in the 
Epic saga and by it and for it. Great 
as it was, for many centuries they con- 
tinued to build it up yet greater. What 
helped them most, perhaps, was the con- 
stancy with which the whole race — to 
use a slightly inaccurate word — must have 
loved and cherished this poetry. . . . 
They are like the watchwords of great 
causes for which men have fought and 
died; charged with power to attract men's 
love, but now, through the infinite shining 
back of that love, grown to yet greater 
power. There is in them, as it were, the 
spiritual life-blood of a people." Here is 
work for American poets if we will — 
" the infinite shining back of that love " 
from the mirror of their poetry, a love 
that founded and built and fixed this 
great nation as the highest expression of 
communal civilization. 

The people of this country are com- 
pounded of the descendants of many gods. 



ii8 The Use of Leisure 

Deeply secreted in the sympathies of their 
hearts are Impulses springing from Sinai 
and Olympus, from the Seven Hills of 
Rome and the Pillars of Hercules, from 
the Norwegian fiords and the sand dunes 
of the Baltic, from the Balkans and the 
frozen steppes of the Caucasus, from the 
hills of WIcklow and Kerry and the chalky 
cliffs of Albion. And all these Impulses 
are surging and flowing and forming the 
great cataract of life we know as the 
United States of America. It would seem 
almost hopeless to expect any man to find 
In this world-shaping torrent what we 
might feel as beauty. And yet that is the 
poet's work, and peculiarly the work of 
the poet of this country. But if it is for 
the poet to focus all these life-rays Into 
one " infinite shining back of that love " 
which men felt for great causes, it is for 
us so to cherish the hope of his coming 
that our hope will create even " out of 
Its own wreck the thing it contemplates.'* 



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